2012-01-09-Linked In Part 1
Seminars@Hadley
Networking with LinkedIn Part 1
Presented by
Tom Babinszki
Moderated by
Larry Muffett
January 9, 2012
Larry Muffett
Welcome to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I am a member of the Hadley Curricular Affairs team; I particularly work with the Forsythe Center. And today’s seminar topic is going to be Networking with LinkedIn Part 1.
Your presenter today is Tom Babinszki. Tom is the Director of the Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship here at Hadley. As we all know, and we’ve become aware, social networking in all its forms has become a very important tool in a number of different ways. Today, we’re going to take a look at a social networking tool with a business and professional focus. That of course is LinkedIn.
So now, let me welcome today’s presenter, my friend and co-worker here at Hadley, Tom Babinszki; Tom.
Tom Babinszki
Good afternoon everybody, my name is Tom Babinszki. It’s very nice to be here and great to see such a good turnout this afternoon. You may have heard me a couple of times already in different Hadley seminars, Hadley events. I think that’s just going to increase in the future as we roll out more and more new offerings at the Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship.
Today I’m going to talk about one of my biggest favorites, LinkedIn, that I’ve been using for several years now. It’s a very interesting and useful social networking site for many reasons. One is its popularity. Last time I checked on the main page of LinkedIn they said that it has 135 million users, which I think is not true anymore, because every day it’s increasing by the thousands. So by the time this information came out, probably it’s even more than 135 million.
LinkedIn is there for people to develop their resumes, to contact with one another, look for jobs, acquire information and basically be active around the world in a professional area and getting in touch with people that they couldn’t do otherwise face to face. And it has so many other advantages, but we are going to cover all of these. What we are going to do today is essentially two parts – the first I’ll show you how to fill in a LinkedIn profile and what you need in a profile. And the second half of my presentation I’m going to talk a little bit about what to do with your LinkedIn profile once you have it set up.
A couple of weeks from today, on January 24th, a Tuesday afternoon, we are going to have another LinkedIn seminar that’s a m ore advanced one, where I’ll talk about how to leverage LinkedIn to the fullest when you’re running your own business, which I had done myself. And I can tell you when you run your business; LinkedIn is really one of the greatest tools you can have. Personally for me LinkedIn was responsible for many of my business deals.
LinkedIn is very professional and it’s actually very hard to mix private issues into LinkedIn communication or LinkedIn information. It’s almost the opposite of Facebook, if you want to put it that way, where most people go there and talk about personal stuff, upload personal pictures and videos. Whereas in LinkedIn, instead of the videos, the sideshows are the more popular ones you upload, very professionally picture at least on this one. And communicate information that will establish you as a professional.
The other thing I liked about LinkedIn is it’s very easy to use. Maybe some people will argue with me, but especially compared to other sites I think it’s very self-explanatory. It’s very easy to find information. And it’s easy to get to most of the functionality, and why “most”, I’ll get to a bit later. So therefore I’m not going to give you step-by-step instructions on how to do every single thing on LinkedIn. Instead I’m going to show you what to do. And the reason being, sometimes this website changes.
In certain areas of the website they have been known about changing some of the wording. They have changed the layout. They have added new and different menu items. So I don’t want to tell you how to do something when it may change in a couple of months or a couple of years. However, I can assure you based on previous years of experience that whatever they put on LinkedIn is going to be very accessible and very easy to find.
And that leads me to another point – that is accessibility for people with disabilities. LinkedIn for the most part is extremely accessible. When it’s compared to other social media sites I would call LinkedIn one of the most accessible ones. It works very well with screen readers. It works very well with screen magnification systems. It works very well with other hardware and software for people with any other types of disabilities. However, there are certain areas which are not fully accessible. LinkedIn staff is very approachable and they are constantly improving their product. If anything I would guess that in the future the LinkedIn website will be more accessible than what it used to be.
Before I start explaining how to get started on LinkedIn, I would like to give you a couple of pointers about what LinkedIn is all about. Essentially LinkedIn is a collection of person’s profiles, which profile contains a resume type of description of yourself. I’m a bit hesitant saying just resume, because it’s really not a resume. In an average resume, depending on whom you ask, people say that it should be a page long or two-pages long and be as brief as possible.
In LinkedIn, you get a chance to talk about yourself – your work, your education, your previous experience, your volunteer experience; everything that’s professionally important about you at a greater length. It’s expected of you to fill in a profile with much more information than what you put in a resume. People will browse all the information that you put up there and read whatever they are interested in. Therefore I believe it’s easier to put together a LinkedIn profile than a personal resume.
Let’s start talking about how to get started on LinkedIn. The website is If you don’t have a LinkedIn account yet, there is a link currently that says “join LinkedIn” on the main page. When you activate that link there is a very, very easy registration process. This process has changed over the years so it may be that down the road it’s going to change again. Currently what you need to fill in is your first name, your last name, your email address and a password. It doesn’t have too many password requirements.
And once you submit this information you are going to receive an email message. In this email you’re going to see a link to activate your account. The reason being is that LinkedIn wants to make sure that it’s a valid existing email address that you have supplied and you are an actual person who will click on the link and go back to the LinkedIn website and verify this information that you just submitted.
So once you activate that link in the email, or you can copy/paste it to your clipboard and go back to your web browser and paste it from your clipboard, you will have to log in to LinkedIn with the email address and the password that you specified. Once you’re logged in LinkedIn screens are pretty identical. You will always find the same information in the first page.
There’s going to be a field where you can update your status. For all practical reasons this field functions the same way as your Facebook or Twitter status field where you can type in what you’re doing, what you’re up to. We’ll talk a little more about this because the use of this field greatly defers from how you would use it in Facebook or Twitter.
Then you have a search area where you can type in names or keywords and a in a drop down box you can specify what you’re looking for. The default is “people”, but you can search for “questions” and “answers”, “jobs”, “Companies” and some “groups” and so on and so forth. We are not going to get into all the categories but we’ll talk more about “people” and “answers”.
And then you have a navigation menu on the top of the page, which contains many things, but we’re not going to discuss all this where it’s not necessary or important. What you need to know about it is it has a profile link, it has contacts, jobs, and inbox links that you’ll be using probably most frequently.
If you just registered on LinkedIn, activate the profile link in this main menu. And we are going to start putting in the information. LinkedIn does a very good job explaining how to fill in your profile and it tells you to what extent is your profile complete, what type of information is missing; it gives you all the information that you’ve already filled in so that you can easily edit it. And essentially if I asked you just to go through the profile and do it yourself, I’m very confident that you would be able to do most of it without much guidance.
There are a couple of interesting things that I would like to point out though. First, when you activated the profile link, find your name; LinkedIn knows your name because you have submitted it when you have registered. And besides your name you’re going to find an “edit” link that you can activate and you can fill in your basic information. One of the pieces of information is “location”; this is very important. LinkedIn uses your location throughout the entire site.”
For example, when you are searching for people or searching for different categories you can see how many people are let’s say from the Chicago area or from the Washington, DC area. There’s two things you can do here whether you want to disclose where you’re located exactly or not. You have to specify the geographic location, but in my case for example, if I don’t want people to know that I am in Winnetka, I can just specify the Chicago area, the Chicago-Metropolitan area as opposed to Winnetka. If I specify Winnetka, it will be pretty obvious that I’m the only Tom Babinszki here and people will be able to find me. It really depends to what extent you want to disclose personal information.
Once you put in your basic information then you can add your pervious work and your studies. You can, in your profile you can add the position, where you can type in your previous employments, and add the school, where you can put in your education. Basically for employment you enter your job title. You enter when you worked at the place; starting date, ending date. And if this is your current position there is a check box that you can activate to claim this is your current position.
The other thing that I would like to call your attention to that would be very useful is there is another edit area in your profile which says “Edit public profile”. Here, when you activate the edit link there, you’ll be able to type in an address the way you can refer to your LinkedIn profile. Now, by default if you want to give somebody the link to your profile it will be just a jumble of all kinds of characters after linkedin.com/en.
But this way, you will be able to put in let’s say your own name, in my case I put in Tom Babinszki, so whenever I want to tell somebody where to find my LinkedIn profile or where I would like to post it on my website, it’s going to be linkedIn.com/en/tombabinszki; en stands for English. If you use LinkedIn in other languages, that’s going to be another story.
I would recommend that once you fill in this URL that when you save it on the following page you are going to see the entire URL to your profile. I would recommend that you save this into a document that you preserve after that because, especially if you use LinkedIn for business purposes you will need this address quite often.
In this area you can also control how you’re going to appear in search results; how much information will show up about you or is not going to show up. I would recommend that you just keep the default settings, simply because this allows the search function to display the most information about you. It’s no point being secretive on LinkedIn; this is why you signed up, so that you can promote yourself as a professional. So unless you have a pretty good reason to hide some of your information I would recommend that you just go with the default.
Then your profile, there’s an area which says “add sections”. This is relatively new and you can find many different sections that you can add. Some of them are certifications, courses, honors and awards, languages, organizations, projects, patents, publications, skills, test scores, volunteer experience; I think this is most of it. These are pretty much self-explanatory. If you activate any of those links on your profile, you’ll be able to add these things.
There are two that I would like to mention. One is languages. I would like to mention that because we have a large international audience and you may just want to add your own language, your mother tongue, or any other languages that you speak. Basically the way it works is when you add the language you just type in the language that you speak, set the level of proficiency and then save it.
Skills are also very interesting and important; it’s also a relatively new feature. When it comes to skills it’s a separate section of your profile once you add your skills. And you can call anything a skill if you wish. It can be any training experience, any software product that you have. There are more and more people who list their skills. So if you go to other people’s profiles, which I’m going to show you soon how, but when you go to other people’s profile and some skills are listed, they’re going to be listed as links.
So you can activate any of those links and you will see an explanation of the skill and after that you will have the option to add that skill to your profile. All you do is activate the “add skill” link, and all of a sudden, without any further questions asked, that skill is going to show up on your profile. Now, why would you use this? If you work in a profession or you have some competitors, they already set up their skills, why would you bother coming up with all the skills. Go through theirs; see if you have any common matching skills and if you do, well that’s your experience too, there’s nothing wrong with that. You can just go through those skills one by one and add them.
What’s really great there is you can also find related skills that you can select from and easily add. If you have added some skills and you go back and edit your skills, you’ll also be able to define the level of experience that you have in that skill and also the number of years of experience that you have in that skill.
The other things that you can add on your profile page – you can add your Twitter account. You can add your website. You can add any other groups and associations that you belong to. And at the end, you can add personal information. Here is where you add your phone number, your address, your birth date, email address, MSN, Skype and so on and so forth, different types of contacts.
Here you can define what you’re going to make available to your contacts – I’ll talk about contacts soon and how those work – and what you make available to the entire public. Your very personal information never becomes publically available, like your email address or phone number, but you can choose to make those available to your personal contacts.
One more thing that’s very important that you can also add on your profile page is your photo. I would highly recommend that you acquire a professionally done photo and upload it to your LinkedIn profile. It’s very important. People would like to see a face matched to the skill sets and names. And especially when you’re applying for jobs or looking for business deals, statistics show that when people can associate a face with a name there is a higher chance of personal interaction. And it’s also more like an ice-breaker that by posting your photo you are showing that you’re a real, genuine person who is willing to share not only information, but any other stuff.
On your profile you’ll find a section for applications. There are some really great ones and some mediocre ones. Applications are ones where other third party companies can develop and add to LinkedIn. I use a couple of those. One is the “tripit” where I’m able to track my travels. I use the “amazon reading list”. I use the different blog applications. The potential issue with these applications is that these are not necessarily done by LinkedIn standards, and therefore their level of accessibility can greatly vary.