Sims Learning Connections

I’ve been using the LinkedIn social networking application for at least three years. Until recently my usage was fairly casual. Now, with my career taking a new direction, I’ve invested more heavily and I am an aspiring, if not yet actual, power user.

Here I share two tips from my own recent experience and a list of resources for tips from others:

A) Do not depend on email notifications or your immediate tactical needs (e.g. adding a new Contact) as the only things that prompt you to log-in. Rather, routinely proactively visit. I now have “visit LinkedIn” as a task on my weekly review checklist.

During these proactive visits:

1. Check your Inbox. Some Invitations to connect only appear here and do not create an email notification.
2. From ‘Home’, check for ‘Questions from your network‘ that you can assist with — Reminder: “give to get”
3. From ‘Home’, click on the company and school names listed under “Just joined LinkedIn.” In my own casual usage period I didn’t recognize these as links and just visually discounted as LinkedIn self-promotion. By periodically clicking on these you’ll have an easy way to add connections to former colleagues and classmates that just became registered LinkedIn users. Of course, this funtionality only works if you have filled in your own Profile for Experience (employment) and Education — So, if you haven’t done so, invest the few minutes it takes to at least update your Profile with these basics.
4. Lastly, from ‘Home’, take a look at “Who has viewed my profile?” — if for no other reason, this is a good motivator for investing in your profile.

B) If you use Microsoft Outlook for email, take the few minutes to download, install, and use the new LinkedIn Outlook plug-in

I appreciate application data-sharing as provided with this synchronization between my Outlook and LinkedIn Contacts and I have also started to benefit from the Communication portion of the Dashboard as this more process-oriented functionality always seemed a ‘missing’ from LinkedIn. This section provides a ‘tickler’ of sorts.

C) Resources that I have found most valuable:

• The official LinkedIn blog
• Guy Kawasaki’s Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn (January 2007)
• Rick Upton’s LinkedIn Notes blog and getting started tips
• Scott Allen’s Linked Intelligence blog
• For additional insight, also refer to articles linked at LinkedIn’s own media coverage page

Closing Note: I intend to share tips and resources more frequently for the various software applications in my own personal learning environment. This is the first in that expected series. Now in my ‘to write queue’ are similar posts for del.icio.us, blogbridge, and search alerts.