LinkedIn may now use your picture to advertise other products.  Change privacy settings if you don’t like this.

Details:

LinkedIn is doing “social advertising”, which means that they can use your picture in LinkedIn ads that are shown to your connections to advertise products that you might not endorse.  Your connections may be misled and think you endorse them, depending on how savvy they are.  (Facebook did this at one point, and most people hated it).

LinkedIn was probably using my picture to “get attention from the ladies”.

Here’s how you stop it:

1. Hover your cursor over your name in the upper right hand corner of your LinkedIn page
2. Click Settings
3. In the lower left, click “Account”
4. In the top middle, click “Manage Social Advertising”
5. Uncheck and Save

Call LinkedIn and offer to sell the use of your picture for $500,000 per year, as I did.

Still waiting.

Do you care if they use your picture?

Sometimes, you search for someone in LinkedIn, but it says “out of network” because they aren’t a 1^st, 2^nd, or 3^rd level connection, and LinkedIn won’t give you the person’s name.   You assume you have to pay LinkedIn $25 in order to see their name.  Not true, because you know me.

Details:

Here’s my real life example

I was talking to a potential client (for social media consulting) at Connecticut Plastics, and she mentioned to me that the owner would be calling me.  I didn’t hear his name clearly, and it would be awkward if I didn’t know him by name when he called.

I did an advanced search on LinkedIn for

Connecticut Plastics owner

and it showed that he had a LinkedIn profile, but he was “out of network”, so LinkedIn wouldn’t give his name.

Cough up 25 bucks?  Not yet.

Look in Google using a fancy trick

Realize that Google has most LinkedIn profiles, so the trick is to somehow find them on Google for free.  If you pick some unique string from the info that LinkedIn does show you, and use a special feature of Google called the “site:” feature, (which allows you to just search one site on the Internet), you may find the name and full profile through Google.

I saw the string

Engineer at Alinabal

in his profile and figured that very few other people would have that string in their profile.  Therefore, I put it into Google, along with the word owner, using the following magic search string

Engineer at Alinabal owner site:www.linkedin.com

and found the profile in the Google results.  I clicked on the link, and LinkedIn showed me the LinkedIn profile page, with name and all.

See a 2 minute sample video

If you want to see a 2 minute video that shows exactly how to do it, go to my web site at

http://www.patrickomalley.com/linkedin-find-out-of-network-profiles-free.html

This technique doesn’t work in every case, but it works in a lot of cases.  If it works for you, please send me $25 each time.

Pretty cool, huh?   Pass it on…

Shameless self-promotion

My email subscribers got this months ago – If you want these before I make them public, sign up for my email newsletter at http://www.patrickomalley.com

Speeches and seminars – I’ve been giving this tip in speeches and seminars for years.  Hire me and get WAY ahead of the curve.  And your friends will think you’re cool.

Put the name of your city (in text form) somewhere in your LinkedIn profile.  Otherwise, you may not be found in searches.

Details:

LinkedIn training tip – put the name of your city in text somewhere in your profile

That’s right.  As unnecessary as it sounds, make sure you put the name of your city in the Summary field or in some other part of your profile.

Why is the tip important?

If someone goes to LinkedIn and uses the Search People function (in the upper right hand corner) to look for

accountant boston

because they are looking for an accountant, it won’t find most accountants in boston.  Why?  Because LinkedIn remembers your location based on your zip code (sort of).  It does not put it in text format.  Regardless, the search won’t find your profile unless you have the word boston somewhere in your profile.

Therefore, if you want potential customers or potential hiring managers to be able to find you, this tip should give you an edge over your competition if they are looking for someone in your city to help them in their business.

The proof, if you care

To test and prove this, do a search for

patrick o’malley boston

You will probably see 4 profiles in the results, and all have the word Boston in their profile.  Oddly, the other 3 aren’t from Boston (but went to Boston schools).  However, each has the word Boston in text somewhere in their profile

If you repeat the search and remove the word boston, just searching for patrick o’malley, you will see over a hundred matches.

Now click “Greater Boston Area” on the right hand side, it will filter those who actually live in Boston (based on zip code), and there are 11 of them.   However, none of them have the word Boston in their profile, so they wouldn’t be found in the search above when the word boston is added to the search.  LinkedIn only knows that they are from the “Greater Boston area” because it internally remembers their zip code, but won’t match that when you do a search for the actual word boston.

The important thing for you to know is that you should put the name of your city in the Summary field of your profile (or somewhere else) so that you appear in search results for your name and city, or more importantly, for your occupation and city.  Try it for your name and city.

Cool, huh?

If you want to see me talking about this as one of my “hot undocumented tips” in a keynote speech, see the video below.  Its not a funny clip, but it is a 60 second version that I gave one of my audiences:

Notes:

• I used to be the #1 match for Patrick O’Malley, and now I’m not in the first 10 pages.  If you want to see a funny blog entry on it, click http://www.the-linkedin-speaker.com/blog/2009/08/27/linkedin-search-people-function-changed-sort-order/
• One of the matches in the above search is a woman, but she worked for an organization with “Pat” in the name

Here are 3 tips for job hunters – change your professional headline, answer questions, and put the words “seeking” and “looking” in your profile.

“I hope it’s gonna make you notice, someone like me” – Kings Of Leon

Details:

If you are looking for a job, these tips should help, and you probably haven’t seen them before:

1) Put the words “seeking” and “looking” in your Professional Headline

Smart and savvy HR people, hiring managers, and recruiters are starting to look for these keywords in LinkedIn profiles, since it allows them to whittle down a list of potential employees.  If someone in Human Resources is looking for a Sales Professional within 50 miles of Boston, there are over 13,700 matches.  If you do the same search and include the word “seeking”, there are 572 matches.

Therefore, instead of “Sales Professional”, consider “Sales Professional seeking Software Sales position in Boston”

2) Make your Professional Headline a marketing phrase

Most people think this should be your current or previous title, like “Accounting Professional”, but it can be so much more.  Use it as a marketing slogan that makes you intriguing to hiring companies and also indicates your employment situation.   Better options might be

• Accountant (formerly at Yahoo) looking for employment nationally
• Accounting Professional seeking opportunity at software startup
• Accounting Professional who loves expense reports, seeking job in Boston
• Former Accounting Consultant to Bernie Madoff seeking position in Alcatraz

Ok, maybe not the last one.

However, make your Professional Headline sexier, attention-grabbing, and clearer, and you’re more likely to get your message out to someone who needs you.   You have to determine what suits your personality, but some people would put words and phrases like “Passionate”, “Creative”, or even “Rock Star” and  “Ninja” in their headlines.  These probably aren’t good for Accounting Professionals, but for other positions, a creative or unique phrase may set you apart.

Look through your LinkedIn connections and get some ideas.

3) Answer questions in the Q & A section

People ask questions in LinkedIn because they need problems solved.  If you are a Graphic Designer, and you give great answers to questions in the Marketing section of LinkedIn’s Q & A, you are more likely to get attention when those readers need to hire someone.  The questions and answers are public and searchable, so others may see your answers and may consider you an expert for hire.

Also, the person who asks the question can also vote your answer as a “Good answer” or the “Best answer”.  Each time you answer a question, your number of “Best answers” is shown, so people can see that you are a proven expert.  LinkedIn’s Q&A is a great way to publically showcase your knowledge, creativity, and expertise.

Note that your Professional Headline shows up on the left hand side of your answer, right below your name.  If your headline “seeking employment”, as discussed in #2 above, anyone who reads and likes your answer also knows that you are looking for work.  If they have a need, you are more likely to get contacted.  At the very least, they may send you a LinkedIn connection request just to help keep you in mind.

I have gotten multiple contracts as a result of answers that I have given in the Q & A section about LinkedIn, Social Media, and Google SEO and PPC.

I’ll do more tips in an upcoming blog post.  Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/617patrick

Hope this helps.

“You know that I could use somebody, someone like you” – Kings Of Leon

In the upper right hand corner of your LinkedIn page, it says Search People, but LinkedIn allows you to do so much more, so it really should say “Search Profiles”.  See some of what you can do in the following post.

Details:

In that box, you can specify any words that you want (not just people’s names).  LinkedIn will then search people’s profiles to see if they can find a match for the words that you specify.  Therefore, you can search for

Oracle

in the Search People box, and you will get a list of search results which will include profiles of people who

1. currently work at Oracle Corporation (or worked there previously)
2. have a job as an Oracle DBA (or had one previously)
3. say that they’ve used Oracle databases in the descriptions of their jobs
4. were nicknamed the “Oracle of Omaha” (if Warren Buffet put that in his profile)

Cool feature – the word Oracle is also highlighted in yellow in the profile, so it’s easier to find.

Therefore, you can use the LinkedIn Search People field to find people by much more than just their name.  You can use it to find people using any attribute that they might put in their profile, including

• their company
• their job
• their skills
• software they’ve used
• hobbies, clubs, fraternities
• and more

If you are searching for someone to solve a problem, you can fill the “Search People” field with any words that someone might put in their profile, like the words underlined here:

• graphic designer
• web developer at Google
• VP of Sales at EMC
• an expert in RDB software

and you will get a set of matches for profiles that contain the underlined words.

You can then refine your search using the advanced search fields on the right.  I will address advanced search more in a future post, and it’s pretty cool.

Note that the results can be sorted (or re-sorted) in 4 ways, including

• Relevance
• Relationship
• Relationship and Recommendations
• Keyword

You can find these choices by looking in the results list under the number of results, where it says “Sort by”.  I usually prefer to sort by Relationship, since I am most likely to want to find someone that I know.  If I only see 2nd level connections, then they at least know someone I know, so I can get a reference.

When I was looking for a graphic designer, the first thing that I did was to use LinkedIn to see who I knew that was a graphic designer.  To refine the search, I then put graphic designer in the title field.  I was given a bunch of choices of first level connections and second level connections, and began my emails and phone calls.

In conclusion, you should now consider using Search People any time you need to find anything that a person could have put in their profile, which can really help you harness the power of LinkedIn search.

Notes:

• In an upcoming post, I will explain some tips on how to set up your profile so that you can be found more easily and more often
• In fairness, LinkedIn tried to show you example of this capability on the far left of the Search People function, where you can click on any of the sample searches.  However, I think they could have taught it more quickly by also changing “Search People” to something like “Search Profiles for any words”.

LinkedIn tells you not to invite people you don’t know, but they don’t make the punishment clear, and it’s harsh.  If 5 people say they don’t know you, you get blacklisted, and you can no longer invite people by name.

Others have written about that part, and I will write about it in the future, but in this post, I’m going to address something no one has written about – how do you find out WHO said “I don’t know this user” to your invitation.  Update – LinkedIn removed this feature, so it no longer works.

Details:

If you send an invitation to someone on LinkedIn, they have the option to Accept, Archive, or say “I don’t know this user”.  If just 5 people say “I don’t know this user”, you are put on the LinkedIn blacklist, and LinkedIn won’t make that clear to you.  Instead, you would be asked for an email address every time you want to invite someone in the future, which is particularly annoying when you’re trying to get in touch with

• college friends
• high school friends
• childhood friends
• sales contacts

or anyone else you haven’t seen in a few years.

Here’s how you find out who IDKed you, i.e., who said “I don’t know this user”.  This just changed in mid-March 2009, and became more difficult, but I have a clever, cutting edge solution.

• This no longer works, but if you see a new solution, let me know
• Go to your LinkedIn home page
• Expand the Inbox on the left (if it isn’t expanded) by clicking on the plus sign box
• Click Sent
• On the Inbox Sent page, click Status in the upper right to see the Invitations that you’ve sent
• Now you want to look for the status “Doesn’t Know”, but it will be in alphabetical order in the middle of the following:

• Accepted
• Bounced
• Doesn’t Know
• Expired
• In Progress
• Pending
• Replaced
• Sent

• At the bottom of that page, it will say

Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 …60

but it no longer lets you click directly on page 27, and the “Doesn’t Know” section is usually about 40-50% of the way in

• Here’s the clever trick

• Click on the number 2 to get to page 2
• Then instead of clicking numbers constantly until you get to 27
• Go to the URL in your address box (i.e. where it says http://www.linkedin.com/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
• At the end it will say split_page=2
• Change the 2 to a 27, or whatever page you want to guess
• Go higher or lower if you have to find the “Doesn’t know” invitations

• Now go find the people and beat them with a stick
• Then I’ll give you the names of the people that IDKed me, and you can beat them with the same stick
• Supposedly, if you get them to invite you, it eliminates the IDK, but I’ve seen at least one case where this didn’t happen.

In fairness, it’s not entirely the other person’s fault.  LinkedIn doesn’t tell anyone the severity of an IDK, or the effect that it can have on others.

I will do more on this later, but this answers a question I hear regularly in my LinkedIn seminars.  Now you can at least if somebody IDKs you, you can find the culprit.

Notes:

• If you have been put on the IDK list multiple times, and LinkedIn won’t let you out of it, email me at the contact email address at the bottom of the page and I’ll tell you how to get around the problem.  Make sure you put “IDK solution” in the subject line

In a future post

• What to do if you want to invite people you don’t know
• My rant on the whole  IDK issue

If you’re in HR (Human Resources), or you’re a recruiter, you are always interested in recruiting new talent.  I assume you use LinkedIn already.  However, here’s a quick tip that may change the way you approach talent management.

Details:

If you use LinkedIn’s Advanced Search feature, you can tell it that you only want to search for people that have created a LinkedIn profile within

• the last day
• the last week
• the last 2 weeks
• the last month
• the last 3 months

or since your last login.

Why do you think they just joined LinkedIn?

There’s a good chance that it’s because they are looking for a job.  You could be the first person to know about it, to recruit them, and maybe to hire them.   At the very least, you could be among the first to develop an online relationship with them.

Here are the exact steps you should use:

• go to your LinkedIn Home page
• click where it says “Advanced” (to the right of the Search box in the upper right hand corner)
• in the upper left hand side of the next page, put in the “Keywords” that you are searching for, like
  • • marketing manager
    • VP of sales
    • accountant
    • (Note that I prefer to put these words in the “Keywords” field rather than the “Title” field for reasons I will discuss in a future blog entry)

• in the lower left hand corner, where it says “Joined” (that you’ve probably never seen or cared about before), choose one of the options
• click Search at the bottom

The results that you see will be for people that have just joined LinkedIn recently.  If there are too many matches, you can refine the list by using the “Interested In” drop down box (just above the “Joined” drop down box), and picking one of the appropriate options, like “Potential Employees”.  Unfortunately, you can only pick one at a time.

Hopefully, this will give you an edge in recruiting new talent just as they begin their job search.

Cool, huh?  Please pass it on to your friends.

If you install it, your browser will sense when you are visiting a job site like

• Monster.com
• Careerbuilder.com
• Craigslist.org

and will make it easy to see if someone in your LinkedIn network works at the company .  Let’s say you are looking at a job post at monster.com for a position at the company HP (Hewlett-Packard).

Here’s how you can use it:

• The LinkedIn browser toolbar will create a blue panel on the left hand side of the browser.
• The panel will tell you the number of people in your LinkedIn network that are employed at that company.
• If you click on the link, it will show you their names, with your first level connections listed on top.
• You could then ask your first level connections at the company for tips on how to get the attention of  the hiring manager.

If none of your first level connections work at the company, click on the link for one of the second level connections.  On the right hand side of their profile, about one screen down, you will see which of your first level connections knows the second level connection, and you can ask them for an introduction (probably by phone).  You can then ask the second level connection for tips on applying to the company.  If you only have third level connections, you can try the same methodology, but you may be less successful.

There is a 3 minute video that shows exactly how it works at LinkedIn Toolbar video

This feature will save you a lot of time and a lot of clicks during your job search, and should be promoted more by LinkedIn.  You’ll be shocked at how much time it will save, and you’ll really feel like you are utilizing the power of your computer and optimizing your time.

Good luck, and please pass it on to your friends.

Notes:

• As the video states, it doesn’t work every single time.  This could be because the LinkedIn code is buggy, or it could be because people put in company names in different ways.  Regardless, it’s worth trying.
• If you like it, let me know by commenting below.
• For my speaking video and other tips, see LinkedIn Training Tips And Videos

Summary:

Why would you misspell your last name in your LinkedIn profile?  Because other people might misspell it when they look for you.

I knew that people would search for me in LinkedIn using the misspelling O’Mally (without the “e”) even though my last name is spelled O’Malley, and I still wanted them to find me.  I discovered a trick that will do it, and I’ll show you in this post.

Details:

I have done many seminars and workshops on LinkedIn, and my surveys show that about 30-40% of people have names that are commonly misspelled.  If you are one of them, people might search for you and not find you, since the LinkedIn search engine won’t find an exact match between their misspelling and your actual spelling.  Realize that if they look once, and they don’t find you, they probably won’t look again.  Bummer.

Here is how you solve the problem.  Put common misspellings of your name in the “Summary” field of your LinkedIn profile as follows:

• Go to your LinkedIn Home page
• Expand the Profile button (click the minus sign in the box to the right of Profile)
• Click Edit My Profile
• Click the word Edit beside Summary, which is about 1 screen down (under the area with the blue background)
• Note that the Summary field is a “free form text” field, so you can put in anything that you want in there.  Put in any common misspellings for your last name.  In my LinkedIn profile, I actually say “Common misspellings” so that people know why I do it (and so Mom knows I can spell my own name).
• When you are done, click Save changes.

Now look up Patrick O’Malley in the “Search People” box in the upper right hand corner of a LinkedIn page, and my profile should be the first match (out of about 60 matches).  If you then look up Patrick O’Mally (without the “e”), and I’m the only match.  Since 20-30% of people misspell my last name, I’m happy that they can still find me.

In conclusion, this could be your best LinkedIn tip of the month if you

• have a last name that is misspelled a lot
• have a friend with a last name that is misspelled a lot.  (Pass it on to them)

Cool, huh?  Pass it on to your friends!

Some good news:

• You can also use this technique with maiden names, first names, and nicknames, which I will discuss in a future blog entry.
• I have a video that shows how to do this at LinkedIn tip misspell last name

Some bad news:

• After you make the change, it may not work immediately, since it may take the LinkedIn search engine a little while to find the new words that you put there.
• This only works when people use the standard search in the upper right hand corner.  If someone uses advanced search and puts in the first and last name separately, this technique won’t work.