I began using LinkedIn seriously in Nov 2007, so here's some personal tips from the past 5 months.
DRAFT: Tue 5/6/08 6:17 pm
Rushed because Cathryn Hrudicka has a meeting tomorrow where she's presenting.
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*** (0) Sign up for LinkedIn & Connect to "Ron Bates", an "open networker" who accepts all invitations. ***
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His 40,000+ 1st-level contacts will become your 2nd-level contacts.
His 1-3 million (?) 2nd-level contacts will become your 3rd-level contacts.
This allows you to try the features of LinkedIn more easily (without paying $240/yr to see everyone).
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*** (1) LinkedIn has become my first choice for Creating Business Dossiers for negotiations & possible business contacts. ***
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My choice of search engines when creating dossiers on people (in the order I use them) is:
(A) LinkedIn (20-25% of my college classmates are here - Harvard 1982-90)
(B) Pipl - Uses the "deep web" to research people (phone numbers, ancestry.com, birth/death records, marriage)
(C) Spock (beta) - Finds people's photos & extracts keywords from webpages to assemble a bio (ala Zoom Info)
(D) Google
(E) Viewzi (beta) - Multiple graphical views (uses many cool ideas from the last 20 years of Human-Computer Interface)
(F) Intellius - Addresses and telephone numbers
When creating 15 dossiers for one of my Dad's business negotiations, I was able to find 8/15 (over 50%) on LinkedIn.
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*** (2) LinkedIn shines at differentiating between 5 possible "Jane Doe"s. ***
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There are two major problems when finding people on the Internet. (A) Finding too many (B) Not finding the person you want.
LinkedIn really helps filter out the "wrong" people. Often just having a current company, current state, college, or old company helps immensely to narrow a search to the "right" person.
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*** (3) LinkedIn helps you find mutual interests, schools, work places, companies, and charitable interests. ***
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*** (4) LinkedIn helps you navigate a social path to a desired business contact. ***
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This requires that you build a personal LinkedIn connections set first.
I'm often surprised at the way the world works. Looking at people's connections, a friend from MA and CA somehow met in GA.
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*** (5) LinkedIn has helped me find 40-50 old college and high school friends, often very good business contacts after 20-30 years. I've also been able to locate some old work colleagues from Microsoft Research. ***
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*** (6) Appearing in LinkedIn searches can result in unexpected cold calls, business offers, and interesting contacts. ***
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When I first posted a LinkedIn profile, I appeared in 30-60 searches/day.
In the post-1990 world, where many HR people search resumes by keyword, it's helpful to have 2 resumes.
(A) Old easy-to-read 1-page version for CEOs
(B) New "curriculum vitae" 100+-page version with lots of keywords & people's names.
After adding tons more stuff to my LinkedIn resume, I now appear in 800-1,000 searches/day (300-500 on weekends).
And I'm getting about 1-3 intriguing connections/offers/e-mails/proposals per day.
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*** (7) Periodically looking at new LinkedIn contacts of your friends can broaden your network slowly. ***
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(A) Seeing people you know appear as someone else's connection
(B) Seeing an intriguing name or job title pop-up, you can read their bio.
Hope these 7 LinkedIn tips help your business career. :-)
- Mitchell Tsai (Harvard '86) - CEO, Spiritual Business Companions : FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Facebook
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1 comment:
Hey check out Virtudex.com it's the best Business Social Network...
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