LinkedIn just added a feature that allows you to “hide” status updates from people who post every time they add a new condiment to their sandwich.

Twitter users – you probably don’t want to send all of your status updates from Twitter to LinkedIn, or people are likely to hide your status updates forever.

Details:

The 60 second version:

LinkedIn made two significant changes to status updates in the last couple of weeks.  Previously, only one status update would show per person on a status page.  Now, LinkedIn will show multiple status updates for a single person.  If you post a lot of back-to-back statuses, you will dominate the pages of your connections, and will probably annoy them.

The second significant change is that people now have the capability to “hide” your status updates, and if they do, they will never see your status updates, and you will never know it.

Action item – don’t  send all of your status updates from Twitter to LinkedIn, or people are likely to hide your status updates forever.

More details, if you have more than 60 seconds:

LinkedIn has made multiple changes to status updates since the beginning of the year.

• Last year, you would only see the last status update from each person, so you never saw more than one from each person.
• You can now have Twitter automatically send status updates to LinkedIn also by using the #in tag, whose implications I talked about in http://www.the-linkedin-speaker.com/blog/2009/11/11/linkedin-and-twitter-now-cross-post-status-updates/

The new changes this month are:

• LinkedIn will now show multiple status updates for one person
• Users can now click a “hide” button to forever eliminates status updates from one of their connections (that updates them on every new type of coffee or sandwich they try)

Here is the unexpected part for most LinkedIn/Twitter users.

In the world of Twitter, its understood that some people post a lot, sometimes 10-20 times or more a day.  I personally think that is a high number, (unless you have 10-20 really useful pieces of content),  but the culture of Twitter accepts it.  In LinkedIn and Facebook, no one wants to see a screenful of updates from just one of their connections, especially if they are mundane.

If you want to hide all status updates from one of these people, here is how you do it, and its bizarre.

If you “hover” your mouse in the upper right hand corner of a status update, the word “Hide” appears.  Yes, ironically, they hid it, copying the same dumb idea that  Facebook used (which I blogged about at http://www.the-linkedin-speaker.com/blog/2009/06/16/facebook-training-tip-remove-annoying-status-updates-hidden-hide-button/).  If you click Hide, you won’t see any more status updates from those people.  If you want to change the list in the future, scroll down near the bottom where it says

Show hidden updates (1) · Manage hidden updates

in small blue letters, and make the appropriate changes.

For active Twitter users, don’t  send all of your status updates from Twitter to LinkedIn, either from

• ping.fm
• Hootsuite
• Tweetdeck
• by using the Twitter #in feature
• or by any other tool

or you may be forever hidden by your connections.

Good luck out there.

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.

A subtle beta feature was added to LinkedIn that will save sales people time.  If you “Search Companies”, it will now tell you who you know someone “through”.

Details:

If you’re a sales person, you will want to research target companies through LinkedIn.  One way to do this is to use the “Search Companies” option, which is actually a drop down option from the “Search People” function in the upper right hand corner of your home page.

If you look in the results, LinkedIn’s new beta feature will now tell you the names of the people who connect you to employees in that company.  This can save you a tremendous amount of time, because instead of clicking through to each profile, then scrolling down to see who you know someone “through”, LinkedIn puts it all on that page.

See the picture below for an example:

I did the following:

• Went to my LinkedIn home page
• Used the drop down menu to change Search People to Search Companies
• Searched for the company BG Medicine
• Clicked through to the company

Under “Current Employees”, I now see that I have a 2^nd level connection to the Chairman and founder, Noubar Afeyan, through my friend Dave Gowel and through J Mark (a LinkedIn connection who I do not know well), and can see connections to other employees without having to click through to each one.

If I wanted an introduction to the Chairman, Dave Gowel has just become my new best friend

Cool, huh?

Bit.ly results are actually public, and I’ll show you how to see how many clicks your competition is getting.  I’ll also explain why you may not want them seeing your clicks.

Details:

Introduction and background on bit.ly

Bit.ly is a URL shortener, which is commonly used in Twitter when people want to post a long URL but can’t fit it in 140 characters.  However, a big advantage to it is that it can actually tell you how many people clicked on the link.  This is great for marketers that are interested in quickly tracking how many people came to their site from Twitter.  If you want more, I also have two advanced videos on bit.ly at

• using bit.ly, then creating the bit.ly bookmarklet (97 second video)
  
• bit.ly “custom name” tip (70 second video)

For current users of bit.ly

The surprising thing is that the results of bit.ly click thru’s are public. They are not just available to the account holder.  If you want to see the number of clicks for any bit.ly link, you just put /info/ in the URL between bit.ly and the unique identifier, and you’ll see the same counts that the account holder would see.

Here’s an example:

On Oct 30^th, @DellOutlet sent out a tweet that said

Last day of Sale – 15% off Dell Outlet Home laptops and desktops with coupons: http://bit.ly/22ZFyi

The tweet can be seen at http://twitter.com/delloutlet/statuses/5288866064 if you want to see it.

Most importantly, anyone can put /info/ into the bit.ly link, and can look at http://bit.ly/info/22ZFyi to see that they got 13,220+ clicks on that link.

The disadvantage of using bit.ly

You would think HP and other competitors would care, and let’s see what HP could learn.  If you believe the common adage that 1% of these people will convert and buy a machine, and assume that they paid $1,000 for it, Dell would have made $132,000 from that tweet.  Tweak the numbers any way you want, but I personally think that they would have made much more than that, and think $200,000-$400,000 is a better estimate.

If I were Dell, I wouldn’t want HP knowing any of this, because HP might smarten up and start using Twitter.  Dell certainly has the technical savvy to use another URL shortener like tinyurl.com and just measure the incoming Twitter traffic through their web logs.  Fortunately for Dell, HP has a pitiful Twitter presence, which is embarrassing to stockholders like myself, but that’s a blog entry for another time.  If someone at HP was smart, and realized that Dell could make hundreds of thousands on a single tweet, they might invest some time and money in a Twitter strategy.

Should you be using bit.ly for your company?  Are you giving competitors useful information?

• http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/091111-011039
• http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/10/BU911AI6K0.DTL&type=tech
• http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/11/09/allen-blue-twitter-and-linkedin-go-together-like-peanut-butter-and-chocolate/

Essentially, LinkedIn allows you to cross-post status updates to Twitter.  This capability has been available for a long time through some free online utilities like ping.fm, so it isn’t really earth shattering.

There are a few problems in the way LinkedIn does status updates that many people don’t realize:

• It will only remember the LAST update by each person
• It will only show 3 updates from your connections, and then if you click to “Show more…”, it will only show the last 10 updates
• There is no way to see other previous updates

LinkedIn could really give you a powerful feature if you could rate other people’s updates.  That way, each day you could just see the highest rated updates from your connections, and just see the most useful comments of the day, week, or month, as voted by your connections, who really are your peers.

They could expand the feature to allow you to also see

• highly rated status updates from 2^nd and 3^rd level connections
• highest rated status updates from anyone on LinkedIn, regardless of whether they are in your network

This isn’t that complicated to implement, and I promise you that someday LinkedIn and Twitter (or someone else) will have this feature.  Then they’ll really have a time saving, powerful feature to brag about.

What other features would you like to see?

God Bless the country that allows me to freely speak my mind about this.  Freedom wasn’t free.  Thank you, Veterans.

You can hide your LinkedIn connections, even from your other connections, with a simple switch.  Here is how you do it, but it does have a set of implications.

Details:

One of the cool things about LinkedIn is that you can migrate your business cards into an “online rolodex”.  However, that rolodex is now visible to all of your other “connections”, and that visibility may be abused by some of them.  For instance, let’s say you have a business acquaintance named Harry Krishnah, and he is a particularly intrusive personality, always testing the limits of what’s cool.  He sends you a LinkedIn connection request, and it’s easier to say yes than to discuss it the next time you see him in public.

He can now look through your connections, and even though he can’t get their email addresses, he may call them and mention your name, even though you haven’t approved of this approach.  The LinkedIn Q&A forums are full of stories like this, and someday it might happen to you.

If your rolodex is a critical asset, and you don’t want your more obnoxious connections looking through your rolodex, you can stop them.  Here’s how you protect your connections from being browsed by your other connections (especially connections who happen to be competitors).

• Go to your LinkedIn home page
• In the upper right area, click Accounts & Settings
• On the right, about 1 screen down, under Privacy Settings, click Connections Browse
• Click No

Its pretty simple, but there are a bunch of implications.

1. This is a single switch that affects all of your connections. I’m sure you would love to see some way to prevent abusive connections like Harry from browsing your other connections, but you’d like to allow everyone else to see them.  There is currently no way to do this, although it is a feature LinkedIn obviously needs.
2. Harry can still see that you know that connection if he does a search by the person’s name or title. If Harry does a search for someone, and they happen to be your LinkedIn connection, Harry can still see that you are connected to this person.  The option above just prevents him from browsing through your whole list of connections.
3. Some LinkedIn users will get mad at you. In the LinkedIn Q&A forums, people get very angry about people that prevent others from looking through their connections, because they think this somehow limits free networking.  I’ve never really believed in this argument, so I fully understand anyone who wants to protect their online rolodex.  Those people may threaten to remove you as a connection.  You can point them to a blog entry that I wrote about How to remove a LinkedIn connection, or how women dump me.
4. Don’t connect with your competition. This part may be obvious, but there may be people who are partners more than competitors, and they may try to leverage your connections to promote their business.  This is an awkward position to be in, and you have to decide what’s best for your business, but if you do connect with the competition, you probably should restrict the browsing as described above.
5. Don’t put your most prized connections into LinkedIn. Some people take this approach to make sure that none of the above mentioned problems occur.

Conclusion

Ultimately, choose what’s best for your business, and realize that it’s easy to change.  Someday, LinkedIn will hopefully improve the power and scope of this protection.

Good luck!

You can export information about all of your LinkedIn 1st level connections to a file.  LinkedIn doesn’t give you very much of the information that it has, but it will give you all of their email addresses.  Therefore, there is a way to send your connections a mass email.  However, please don’t be a spammer.

Details:

Here is how you export the information from all of your LinkedIn connections to a file:

• Go to your LinkedIn home page
• In the left navigation area, click the box to the right of the word Contacts to expand that area
• Now click Connections just below Contacts
• At the bottom on the left, click Export Connections
• Export to Microsoft Outlook (.CSV)
• Put in the text for the security image if requested (it only asks the first time during a session)
• Click Export

LinkedIn will create a CSV file, and the email address will be in the 6^th column.  However, for some annoying reason, LinkedIn does not put many of the other important fields into the file.  As of May 12, 2009, it only writes out the following values

• First name
• Last name
• Email Address
• Company
• Job title

even though it has a lot of the other information and could easily export it for you.

If you wanted to send a bulk email (mass email) to your connections, you could now

• extract all of the email addresses from the CSV file
• send them an email through the email program of your choice

Please be cool, and don’t spam them.

It’s a good idea to periodically do this as a backup just in case LinkedIn goes out of business, or decides to remove this functionality.  There are a LOT of limitations to this feature, and I will address them in a future blog post.

Good luck!

The Professional Headline in your LinkedIn profile should not just be your current title.  It should be a marketing slogan.

Details:

If you were looking at a Professional Headline in LinkedIn, which one would be more memorable?

Jeff Ogden
Sales/Marketing Consultant

or

Jeff Ogden
Sales/Marketing Consultant, making you a “ferocious competitor”

In my opinion, the second one is more memorable, more powerful, and more intriguing.

The important thing to note is that your Professional Headline does not have to be your current job title.  The field is 120 characters in size, meaning that you can fit 15-20 words in there, so you should make it more of a marketing slogan than a simple title.  At the very least, you may want to add some flair, some detail, or some personality to your title.

Alternatively, you could add any of the following:

• More detail about your company
• Your location
• Something cool about your job
• The fact that you are looking for a job

For instance, if your job title is something like

1. Sales Professional
2. Accountant
3. Event Planner
4. IT Manager

you might want to consider changing it to one of the following:

1. Sales Professional with the hottest disk technology in Boston
2. Accountant who was responsible for the demise of AIG
3. Event Planner, preparing golf outings for executives in Phoenix
4. IT Manager seeking employment in New York

Ok, maybe not #2, but you get the idea.  These all convey much more information that the simple title would provide.  Remember that it is called your Professional Headline, so take the story of your work life, summarize it in a few words, and try using it for a while.  You can always change it later.

Realize that your Name and Professional Headline are the only two things that others will see in the some places in LinkedIn, like when

• you answer questions in the Q&A section
• you leave messages in the Group discussion forums
• someone looks at their own connections
• someone is looking through another person’s connections

Therefore, if you give a few great answers in the LinkedIn Q&A section, you also have an opportunity to tell people (in a subtle way) that you are “seeking employment in New York”.  If your answer is credible enough, you may be a click away from getting contacted for a job interview.  After all, the people reading it were interested in the solution to a problem, and you had one.  If they have a lot of problems, you may get a job solving their problems.  If your Professional Headline just said “IT Manager”, the reader might just move on.

I have gotten business using the exact technique above.  In fact, I got a recent contract from someone named

Josh Chernin
General Manager at Web Industries; Itinerant Writer; and Decent Little League Coach

which I thought was a very memorable example of a Professional Headline.  In just 11 words, you learn Josh’s job, his passion, and you learn that he is an active father.  He also appears to be a really good guy (and he is).  If you combine his Name and Professional Headline with the hundreds of great answers he’s given in LinkedIn’s Q&A section, you really begin to feel like you know a lot about him, and I think that’s a big part of what social media is all about.

Therefore, think about dressing up your Professional Headline a little, and see what results you get.  Look at the ones your connections have set up, and get some new ideas.  Look at the Q&A section of LinkedIn, and consider using some of their thought processes to reform your own.

What are the best Professional Headlines you have seen?

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 knows that Jim is a nickname for James, but it doesn’t know that Vin is a nickname for Vincent.  Therefore, when you search for someone, make sure you try both nicknames and formal full names.

Details:

My story, (which you can skip if you’re in a hurry):

A few years ago, I was searching for Vin Bono in LinkedIn, but couldn’t find him.  He was the CTO at the computer hosting company that housed our machines at a previous company, and he was also a friend of mine, so I wanted to be connected to him.  He wasn’t there, so I moved on.

A few months later, I tried again, but he wasn’t there.  I was surprised because he was just the combination of technical wizard, businessman, and social person that would know how to utilize LinkedIn.

Many months later, I tried again and he wasn’t there.  Then, I thought to try Vincent Bono, and found him.  In fact, he accidentally had two profiles, both using his full name.

I was surprised that the LinkedIn search engine didn’t know that Vin was an abbreviation for Vincent, since it did know that Chuck was short for Charles, and Jim was short for James.

The implications for you:

• If you are searching for someone using Search People in the upper right hand corner of your LinkedIn home page, and don’t find them using one name, try their nicknames, full names, et cetera
• Put your nickname and last name into a LinkedIn search, and see if your profile appears.  If it doesn’t, use the technique from my previous blog post at LinkedIn Tip – Misspell

Please pass this on to others with funky nicknames.  It would be a shame if you or one of your friends didn’t

• get a job
• find a friend
• make a deal

because you couldn’t find someone, or they couldn’t find you on LinkedIn because of this problem.

Good luck!

Here’s a 50 second video of me speaking about this at a corporate keynote.

LinkedIn expert tip about nicknames