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?

Here’s how your Facebook status updates can be seen by the public, and how to restrict them so the public cannot search for them.

Details:

You may know that your public status updates can be seen by anyone in the world, but do you know how people find them?  I’ll show you both sides here:

How to post Facebook statuses to the public

When you post a status update, just to the left of the “Post” button, there is a drop down menu that allows you to post to the whole world or just to a “custom” group, like your friends, or even a more restricted group, like your friends except for work friends.  In my shameless self promotion, here I am on Fox news talking about this at 1:23.  Note that at the time (Feb 2011), the “Post” button was the “Share” button.

How to see public Facebook status posts

Let’s say you wanted to see what people are saying about Comcast.  If you put Comcast in the search box at the top of your Facebook page, it will show you

• The Comcast business page
• A bunch of “Comcast sucks” and “I hate Comcast” pages

However, at the bottom, click where it says “see more results for comcast”.

Now, on the left, click “Public Posts” and you can see posts from anyone that set up their status updates so that they can be seen by the public.

Implications – why you care

Here’s how this information can be helpful to you:

• Careful what you say – your bosses, ex-girlfriends, enemies, and competition can see it
• My conclusion is shown at 2:59 in the video above – don’t post anything on the Internet that you wouldn’t want to be seen on the nightly news
• If you are getting cable, you’ll see why you don’t want to get Comcast.  The public is constantly talking about their bad experiences with them, and I’m one of them.  This works for any product you are considering.
• If you have a brand, you may want to monitor what people are saying about you.

Be careful out there.

***************************************************************************************
Patrick O’Malley, aka (617)-PATRICK, is a professional speaker on social media and Google ranking.

Summary:

Before you call a prospect, check their interests.  Or you can look for interests in a “reverse direction”.

Details:

If you are

• cold calling
• calling a new prospect
• meeting someone for the first time

you should have some way to start the conversation.  If you care cold calling, you need some way to get their attention in the first 5-10 seconds, since most prospects don’t have time for idle chatter.

LinkedIn tip

Look at the prospect’s LinkedIn profile and look at their “Interests”, which are at the bottom.  This is a clever technique that very few people use.

Real example of scrutinizing a LinkedIn profile:

When I went to do the keynote in the video above, I knew I would meet the CEO of AMS, Jim Bourdon.  I looked at his profile and noticed that he listed “golf” among his interests.  Therefore, the first thing I started talking to him about was golf, and the conversation went effortlessly.

Using interests in “reverse” fashion:

Let’s say that your target prospect is typically a CFO, and you are trying to get some new prospects to join you for a golf outing near Boston.  Try the following – do an advanced search in LinkedIn with the following search

• Title: “chief financial officer” OR cfo
• Keywords: golf OR golfing
• Location: near Boston

Now take a look at the results, and the CFOs that you contact will probably be much more interested in your golf offer.

There are even better, smarter, and more efficient ways to do this, and we teach them in our training sessions, which are full of awesomeness.  Call (617)-PATRICK for more.

Go forth and prospect.

This is a 90 second “rap” that I did in a social media keynote speech at the LOMA Insurance Conference in Las Vegas last October.  And it ain’t worth 50 cent.

Details:

The audience was full of insurance professionals who had just passed a test, like FMLI or FSSI, and were awarded with a trip to Las Vegas to go to this conference (and to see me).

Here are the words to the rap:

If you meet someone cool, and you like how they think
or you go to the pool, and they buy you a drink

if you meet someone smart, and they just can’t disguise
that they just passed the tests, for the FMLIs

or if somebody studied, until they got dizzy,
and passed all the tests for the designation FSSI

and there are people here who proved they’re the best
at customer service so they have the ACS

and then they came here although they are still in a tizzy
and they’re starting to look like the old band …. Thin Lizzy

and I know there are others that some of you had…
and if I had more time I’d make up a rhyme just as bad

I guess my designation, if I thought this was clever
from your cool generation, would be “Worst Rapper Ever”

but when all of you are playing in the “City of Sin”,
don’t just party and drink. Also – get LinkedIn!

Audience applauds wildly, starts throwing panties and motel keys like they used to do for Elvis…

Summary:

Whether you want to make a sale, get a job, or network for business, it’s a good idea to be connected to powerful people like CEOs, but it’s tough to get their attention.  Here’s a unique and original idea that might get you some positive attention from some CEOs and other Chief Officers.

Quick version:

Want to connect with CEOs?  How about finding the ones that spelled the word “chief” wrong in their LinkedIn profile, and telling them about it.  You can do that with a LinkedIn search, and you may someday get a sale, a job, or a business relationship.

Introduction:

This is one of my favorite original tips, and it might help some of you

• make a sale
• get a job
• develop a great new relationship

I’ve been giving this idea out in recent speeches that I’ve given in the last couple of months to

• the LOMA insurance conference in Las Vegas
• Meeting Planners International in Washington, DC
• the Inside Sales Conference 2010 in Boston
• the Boston BestEvents Expo 2010 in Boston
• the ASTD National Chapter Leaders Conference, in Washington, DC
• Northeastern University Marketing students in Boston

so if you were in one of those sessions, you’ve heard it already, and most people really liked it.  I already gave it to my newsletter readers over a month ago, so they had a head start on you.  You should sign up for my newsletter on my web page.

If you want to see the video where I explained this to 350 College and University business officers at EACUBO, click on the video at the top of this article.

How to get the attention of some CEOs through LinkedIn

If you want to connect with CEOs, the easiest way to do it is by helping them in some way.

What if they misspelled the word “chief” in their LinkedIn profile, and you tell them about it before someone else does?  Here’s the idea:

• Do an “Advanced search” in LinkedIn
• Under Title, put in “Cheif Executive Officer” with the word cheif spelled wrong
• Take a look at the 425 results, of which 200 are in the United States
• Send them a LinkedIn invitation, and in the invitation, tell them about the misspelling
• I usually send an introduction that says

FYI, I just wanted you to know that you spelled Chief wrong (i.e. cheif) in your profile. Just trying to help.

While I’m at it, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.

- Patrick O’Malley

• When LinkedIn asks how you know them, I usually say it’s through my current company

If you help them, there is a good likelihood they will accept your invitation, and in some cases where I’ve done it, I’ve also gotten some “thank you” replies or further discussions.  I’ve never asked for anything from them, but I could probably ask for an introduction to one of their connections in the future, or get 5-10 minutes of their time to talk about Social Media Training for their sales staff or other employees.

You could do the same type of thing  for your business whenever you thought the time was right.

Danger of IDKs

There is a danger in doing this.  If the recipient clicks “I Don’t Know <you>” in response to the invitation, you will get a black mark from LinkedIn.  If you get 5 of these, you get put on the IDK list.  This means that you can’t invite any more people unless you know their email address.

However, there is a solution.  First, if you email LinkedIn at cs@linkedin.com and apologize, they usually forgive, unless you’re a chronic offender.  If that doesn’t work, I do have another radical solution, and if you email me, I will send it to you.

Regardless, I don’t think many of these CEOs would IDK you, and I have sent out dozens of these myself.

Good luck out there…

People pay $100,000 or more to get to the first page of Google results.  Here’s a pretty cool technique I discovered which can get you there in one hour, for free.  Pretty cool, huh?

Details:

Value of a high Google ranking:

When people search for your product or service, they go to Google.  Therefore, every business wants to show up on the first page.  However, it’s tough to get there, because every other business wants to be there also, and only 10 sites can show up on the first page.

Therefore, most companies have to pay for Google ads (on the top and right hand side of the results  page), and some pay $100,000 or more a year to do so – and it’s worth it.  Google makes almost all of their money on these ads, so they are effective, but it’s better to rank on the left hand side in the organic results, since 65% of people never click on a paid ad.

Others pay an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consultant (like me) to show up in the organic rankings on the left hand side, where most people look anyways.  It’s tough to get your web page listed there, because everyone who is an “accountant” wants to show up there when a potential customer searches for “accountant”.

Consultants who do SEO know the fastest ways to get there, but I have 5 techniques that can get you there in a few days if there isn’t too much competition, and I’ve never seen anyone publish this one.

This particular technique might get you there in an hour – no kidding.

The trick is to create an entry on Craig’s List, and to have it contain the keywords that your potential customer might look for.  This 4 minute video will show an actual example and some more details…

There are huge upsides to this approach:

• Its free to do (and I gave it to you for free)
• It can legitimately get you to the top of Google results in an hour, as you can see in the video

There are some problems with this approach:

• If there is a lot of competition for your keywords, you may not rank highly
• Its transient.  It will probably only last a few days, and Craig’s List doesn’t like it if you re-post in less than 4 days or so
• You’d have to put your contact information in there, including your phone number, email, a pointer to your web site, et cetera
• Depending on your business, buyers may not be convinced by a Craig’s List ad.  However, at the very least, you’d knock some of your competition out of the top 10.

The actual Craig’s List entry in the example (from 9/30/10) is at http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/doc/evg/1981470943.html and the search that was done in Google was

Amateur videographer Washington, DC

Of course, you probably won’t’ want to advertise yourself as an amateur videographer, but the fact is that if you choose keywords that your target market would use to search for your service, you can use this technique to get a great Google ranking for a while.  After a few days, you can do it again.

Good luck out there.

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?