Archive for LinkedIn
New Outlook Social Connector & Why You Should Use It
Posted by: | CommentsMany people are using a web-based email, but for those of us who still live and die using Outlook, (like me), I want to talk about Outlook Social Connector, why I use it and some steps to get, install and what it looks like.
1. I can easily search for email, appointments, attachments and updates from each of my contacts when using the connector. If you’re like me and don’t get to LinkedIn and Facebook enough, you can catch up on clients’ updates from within email.
2. I’ve noticed that even if I’ve not connected with some of email contacts, sometimes their photo will pop in anyway. If their Facebook profile is public, then it should pop in (or so I’ve read). Conversely, if someone has mega privacy settings, then you may not see much of them. So having a face to put with a name is nice (but sometimes disturbing-haha).
3. If you live in your email all day, you’ll be more up to date with what’s happening with your clients. If you see an achievement, you can quickly send an email or go make a comment on their social media page.
4. It’s just a cool thing to have and really brightens up my email. You can adjust the size of your social connector to stretch the entire width of your screen and pull it up near the top of your screen to get a great view of what’s going on with people you care about.
Steps for Downloading, Installation & Use of Outlook Social Connector
Outlook Social Connector has been around for a couple of years, but there’s been a recent update (April, 2012), and if you don’t download and install it, some of your components will stop working effective May, 2012.
Outlook Social Connector – Separate Components
First, you’ll need the connector itself – find it here. If you don’t need to update, it won’t install.
Next, you’ll need to get the components or pieces of the social part you want. Below are the five currently available. (So glad they took MySpace off). All these components can be found here. There are separate downloads for each piece.
Have Outlook closed when installing – but it’s OK if it’s open, you’ll be prompted to restart upon installing the components.
Restart Outlook and get going
When you start Outlook, you’ll be presented with this pop-up where you can choose which components you want to use. The My Site is for people who use SharePoint.
You’ll be prompted to enter your username and password for each site you want to add, then you’ll see the checkmark when you’re connected – that’s it! Start scrolling through your emails and watch your email pop with photos and updates. If you’re connected to someone in multiple ways, you’ll see all the updates if you select ‘all’.
If you don’t get the above screen, you can get to it by going to ‘View’ then look over to the right where it says ‘People Pane’, open it and then you’ll get the accounts screen. Make sure you have the people pane ‘on’ or you won’t see it.
Below is an example of someone I’m connected with on LinkedIn & Facebook. You can see she’s active and uses social media a lot! The icons I’ve circled are very helpful because I can choose to show only emails I’ve received, or only appointments, only attachments or only updates. It saves time.
If you have questions or need some troubleshooting, here’s the FAQ on problems with social connector. Not everything works all the time, they still seem to be working bugs out. If you’re using it, how do you like it? If you’re not, do you think you’ll install it?
LinkedIn – New Features To Highlight Strengths
Posted by: | CommentsDo you check LinkedIn periodically for new features that might beef up your profile and make you look like more of an authority? 
The best way to find out is just to log into LinkedIn and get in the edit mode and first look over your profile. Look around for anything that says ‘new’. Below you can see something new added. This section will highlight courses, earned certifications, volunteer work, language proficiencies, or received awards. Now there’s a place to list them so they’ll show in your profile.
Mashable wrote an article stating that employers are 41% more likely to hire people who volunteer and consider it nearly on the level as working for pay. This is one of the new sections you may want to fill out.
A partial list of sections available is below When you’re in your profile ‘edit’ mode, you’ll see the ‘add sections’ area as below. Just click on it and there’s a form that’ll make it easy for you to complete. Click save and look at your updated profile.
Update Your LinkedIn Profile Regularly
Remember, when you make any changes to your profile, add anything, it goes into a news feed that appears to your connections – either in an email (if they’ve signed up to receive updates), or they’ll see it over to the right in the news feed column there.
Social Media Marketing
If you have a business or work at a business, you should have a LinkedIn profile.Why? Try Binging or Googling your name and you’ll most likely see that your LinkedIn profile appears near the top of search results. It seems the search engines really like to index LinkedIn. With the ease of set up, why not do it? Give me a call at 405-633-1770 or email me a lynn (at) extremevirtualsupport.com if you need help getting business social media set up and optimized!
LinkedIn for Job Seekers
Posted by: | CommentsThis week I’m talking about building or enhancing a LinkedIn profile for those looking for a job.I was talking with a friend who lost his job after being
with the same company for over 25 years. I have another friend in the same situation and although they’ve been talking to outplacement counselors, they still have questions about LinkedIn and social media in general. They are doing the right things; talking and networking with many contacts, recreating resumes and spiffing up their LinkedIn profiles.
Here are a few tips for getting your LinkedIn profile up to speed:
1. Use the suggestions in the LinkedIn ‘wizard’ to build your profile. Look carefully for all of the ‘edit’ buttons and use them to fill as much information in as possible.
- make sure you utilize the personalization for your public profile if you don’t change this, your name will show up with numbers or characters after it – not professional. Most corporate people won’t have a website, blog or Twitter account, so don’t worry about those sections.
make sure you choose a personalized name
2. For people looking for a new position, use the resume builder to import your resume first – completing your profile will go much faster.
3. Do fill out the Summary field – it’s prominent real estate where you should list your accomplishments, background and experience.
4. Join some Groups and get active in them. You’ll see the Groups button near the top of each screen. Hover over it and you’ll have a choice of ‘Your Groups’, ‘Groups You May Like’, ‘Groups Directory’ and ‘Create A Group’. If you’ve already filled out your profile, LinkedIn will give you groups you may potentially be interested in based on your resume and experience. Otherwise, click on the ‘Groups Directory’ and you can enter in search terms to see what’s out there. Try to get involved with a couple of groups in an area you’re looking to be employed in and participate or start discussions.
5. Now’s the time to set up a professional email address if you don’t have one. This is not the place to have ‘superdad@hotmail.com’ .
6. Once your profile is completed, LinkedIn will show you people you might know, based upon your employment history. Connect to everyone you know. If you’ve worked with someone, you don’t have to know their email address (saves time and effort).
7. There’s a LinkedIn ‘Learning Center’ that will help you get up to speed on how to use LinkedIn.
8. If you have a collection of contacts, use the export feature and export to Outlook, Yahoo or Apple contacts and then import into your contacts to have them at your fingertips.
9. Ask for recommendations from your peer group as well as higher ranking officers/directors and former subordinates.
10. Upload a picture – it should be a head shot of good quality.
11. LinkedIn has a ‘what are you doing’ box, like Facebook does. This is where you could post links to articles you think would be of interest to your connections, perhaps time management tips, stories about your industry. Most LinkedIn postings I see are very business-oriented and focused. Save your personal thoughts for posting over at Facebook.
Remember, every time you accept a connection request, post a link, join a group or say something within a group, that’s traffic for you. Whenever one of these activities occurs, it’s fed into the news stream where your connections and even connections of your connections will see your name. More eyeballs on your name and profile is what you want.
I hope these tips will motivate you to make some positive changes to your LinkedIn account to get noticed.
Twitter on LinkedIn
Posted by: | CommentsIf you find it difficult to tear yourself away from Twitter and Facebook to pay a little attention to updating your LinkedIn accounts…never fear– you can still get your Twitter fix on LinkedIn!
If you have a well-developed LinkedIn presence, you’ve probably added Applications to your page. I wrote about the new LinkedIn Applications last November. One of them is Company Buzz. After clicking on Applications and then clicking on Company Buzz, you’ll have this app up and running in no time. It defaults to giving you a choice of looking for ‘buzz’ on companies listed in your resume.
After you’ve sifted through news on your old employers, type a name, company name or phrase in the search box and you’ll get the latest results – just as if you were on Twitter. You’re not limited to just the default companies you’ve worked for.
I did several searches and then went to Twitter and did the same searches and the results were pretty much the same, so it doesn’t seem that there’s any kind of delay.
Sharing & Trends
While you’re doing some updating of your page, you notice a tweet that has a link to an interesting article and you’d like to share it with a client or co-worker. On each of the ‘tweets’ in Company Buzz, there’s a ‘share’ hyperlink below and to the right of every tweet.
Simply click ‘share’ and your selected tweet will be imported into a LinkedIn email message where you can select up to 50 people to receive the tweet along with any information you’d like to add to it. Nice and easy.
You’ll also notice a graph right below the Company Buzz section. This shows how many times the ‘trend’ of a topic you’ve chosen was mentioned on Twitter on a certain date. Another feature to explore are the ‘buzz words’ associated with your search. Click on any of the words and your Twitter stream will adjust to show only tweets with particular buzz words associated with your topic. This ability to drill down into a topic could save you time and give some interesting and worthwhile results.
This video gives a rundown on installing and using the application.
If you haven’t installed this application, give it a try and share some interesting news or articles with your connections.
New Linked In Applications
Posted by: | Comments
LinkedIn introduced nine new applications a couple weeks ago that we’ll take a look at. It’s great to have some ways to customize my LinkedIn. I also use Facebook, which has a seemingly unlimited number of apps/widgets, etc. to add, so this is a very welcome addition to LinkedIn.
You can find the ‘applications’ icon on your home page-click it and you’ll see the offerings.
Of the nine, I was most impressed by Company Buzz. I added that application and it almost instantly added tweets (from Twitter), from a former employer and schools I’ve attended. This app will let you know what others are saying about your company and performs searches on key words to bring those tweets to you. This app could provide some interesting insight into a current, past or prospective employers or personalities. This app will let you customize and share with co-workers.
Reading List – this is from Amazon and pretty self-explanatory. Browse through recommended or current books being read by either your industry, your connections or you. Looking at the lists, I wonder if these people are really reading all theses books…
My Travel – if you want everyone in your network to know where you’re going and what you’re doing – add this app. It’s being promoted as a way to get together with your connections while traveling. I see it as TMI.
The next six apps, we’ll discuss in pairs as it seems to me they do pretty much the same thing:
Blog Link & WordPress – Adding the Blog Link app will enable it to search out and install on your page, all the blogs from your connections as well as your own blog. Rather like a feed reader feature. The WordPress app will put your blog on your LinkedIn page. When I added it, it showed snippets of my four latest blog postings-nice.
Slideshare Presentation and Google Presentation – Do you have a product, service or event you want to highlight? Perhaps you want to let your connections know about your new business, a side business or new employees. Here are two ways to have it appear to your connections. The Google app is handy if you already have a Google account and use their docs feature. Slideshare Presentation is a free on-line service where you can post your presentation to the world. You will need an account with one of these in order to upload. There are file size limits (very generous), and format limits that should meet about everyone’s needs.
Huddle Workspaces and Box.net – here are two collaboration/file sharing sites that have partnered with LinkedIn to provide users with a way to collaborate from within LinkedIn. Both allow 1GB of free storage whether you sign up here or already have an account with them. Documents can be uploaded, edited (even photos), and shared with team members or others. When I clicked to add Huddle to my apps, I didn’t have to set up an account (one less log-in and password to remember). There is a nice interface with tabs where I could add files, invite contacts or have discussions. This is a nice feature to have if you’ve made a connection with someone and have a need to share files.
So there you have it – a nice assortment of apps to add to your page. Although you are given the opportunity to arrange your apps in the order you wish, they all will still line up on the right column and they extend downward quite a ways (depending on how many apps you have). This is not real eye-appealing, but maybe they will do some work with that later. Try some out and let you connections know they are available.
