I’m on LinkedIn, but I’ve never got round to putting much effort in to creating my profile. A few old colleagues have connected with me recently, and I started this week thinking that I needed to smarten the thing up. Yesterday I was browsing the blog of one of our new WordFrame partners - Des Walsh who is based over in Australia. I read the good things he said about the platform and the partnership, but then I spotted his latest post Spring Clean Your LinkedIn Profile, Part One: Basic Makeover. Perfect timing.
Des points out the importance that a LinkedIn profile can have in the current recruitment process, or in making connections for new customers and assignments. Like Des I’ll regularly use LinkedIn, along with ZoomInfo and other tools, to research a new potential client, or the speaker at the next conference. If I use it like that myself, why the hell haven’t I paid more attention to my own? Des carries on:
“For a good overview of what is involved in setting up or refreshing your LinkedIn profile, no one, as far as I know, has yet improved, for immediacy and clarity, on Guy Kawasaki’s January 2007 blog post LinkedIn Profile Extreme Makeover. This shares, with a detailed screenshot, the advice Guy had received from some very knowledgeable LinkedIn staffers, Kay Luo and Mike Lin, on how to make his LinkedIn profile more useful.”
As usual, Guy Kawasaki is properly in tune with the new world of work, and his well crafted extreme makeover is a great place to start. Guy says:
“If you’re going to use LinkedIn, you should put some effort into your profile. My original one reflected a minimal amount of effort. For example, many of my current and past affiliations were missing, and I did not craft good descriptions of what I stand for. This incompleteness made my profile ineffective for networking. Hopefully, my makeover will provide some ideas to help you.”
His current profile shows what can be done. It also reminds me of one of my favourite Mark Twain quotes which is:
“I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”
Getting the same economy of language that Guy has used to capture what you are all about in few brief sentences is going to take a bit of thought, trial and error before you get it right. To help you, Des’s post has some good advice and some useful links to a step-by-step post at LinkedIn Life, an “insider’s guide to using LinkedIn”, or Scott Allen’s riff on Guy Kawasaki’s extreme makeover post. Have a go and set aside some time to improve yours (and think about doing it regularly). If you look at mine today you’ll see the before - check back later or in a few days and I hope it has improved. Don’t forget to look out for part 2 on Des’s blog too.
