Tag Archives | LinkedIn

Everyone wants to be a badass on Facebook Twitter and Pinterest because it seems cool. You look popular even though you’re just another lonely soul with a laptop.

Sadly, we all can’t be bitchin’ like Mike Stelzner. I’ve had several thousand Twitter followers for a year now, and you know what it’s gotten me? Jack shit.

My order at McDonald’s is still fucked up. No random strangers stop me on the corner asking for autographs. Klout perks are overrated crap from China.

But LinkedIn is a different beast. When you’re influential on LinkedIn, you get better jobs. Better jobs mean more money.

It pays to be influential on LinkedIn. Literally.

So, here are 7 ways to be an influential badass on LinkedIn:

1. Have a good picture of yourself - Don’t bitch that there aren’t any good photos of you. Basically everyone has a phone with a camera and crap load of photos of themselves on Facebook. Get off your lazy ass and find a nice professional photo of yourself so I can see you’re a human and not a cleverly disguised kitten.
2. Get your nice resume on there - I know you probably made your LinkedIn profile and then immediately forgot it. If you have a job, you’ve probably written a nice resume somewhere. Copy and paste that shit into your LinkedIn profile.
3. Add some skills, yo - You’ve got mad skills. Get them on LinkedIn, so everyone can know you’ve got mad game at “Social Networking” and “Personal Branding.”
4. Connect with people - Do I really need to remind you that you need to be social on a social network?
5. Get some recommendations - Someone, somewhere, has enjoyed working with you. Find that person. Ask them to write something nice. Bribe them if necessary.
6. Don’t worry about posting shit - How many times do you hear about people who read something on LinkedIn? Exactly. If you see something worth sharing and you want to go for it, do it. But don’t worry about making it a priority if you’ve got better shit to worry about, like real life, or a zombie apocalypse.
7. Don’t link your Twitter account - Most people blend their personal and professional Twitter accounts. No one wants to read your boring or embarrassing tweets on LinkedIn. We’re all to busy stalking people. Keep it separate.

Those are just the basics. But now you’ve got the tools to be totally awesome. Get off Facebook and do some social networking that might actually make a difference in your life.

How are you going to be a LinkedIn badass?

LinkedIn is a total badass of a social network. LinkedIn does one thing and does it well, and tells the other social networks to fuck off.

But LinkedIn is starting to look like a dinosaur. It layout is cluttered and it looks old, like a house from Hoarders.

It’s design has nothing really going for it, or against it. There are a million features no one uses. The only people who have ever used them are “personal branding experts,” and it’s questionable how much they got out of them.

The biggest thing that bugs me about the profile design is it’s more disorganized then  five year old’s toy box . Everyone’s profile is like the world’s longest list of self-promotional crap. And if you’ve ever had more than one job, then it goes on forever. And ever. And Ever.

Don’t even get me started about people with a hundred recommendations.

So let’s fix it. LinkedIn, figure out a way to make our information relevant and easily accessible, but without looking like it’s going on forever and ever.

It can be done. Most people’s careers aren’t that interesting. Make things collapsable. Make users prioritize which information is useful to them. Figure it out before we all become inundated with overly long and boring professional profiles.

Otherwise we’ll all look like bunch of digital career hoarders, and I don’t want a TV crew from A&E going through that shit.

I’m pretty open to connecting with people on LinkedIn because connecting on LinkedIn is the best way to stalk someone. In fact, I typically will connect with anyone who requests to connect with me, so long as they don’t seem like a complete sociopath.

But people have begun to abuse my willingness to connect.

These people who I’ve been connected with for months and years have suddenly decided that it’s OK to use LinkedIn to send me weird pitches. Instead of using it to cultivate a relationship, they just decide to  send me a demo of weird tool I’ll never use. I also get messages that assume I know everything about my connection’s lives, because I’m stalking every single moment of their existence.

Seriously people. Stop abusing your power.

You already have all the information you need to contact me appropriately. LinkedIn is the best tool for stalking people because they tell you everything you need to know about contacting them professionally.

Just because we’re connected on LinkedIn doesn’t mean we’re bosom buddies. I know, I shared a link you posted, but that was really just coincidence, not affinity. Stop reading so deeply into the relationship you’ve imagined between us.

Use LinkedIn to build relationships, not stomp all over them like Godzilla. Slow, careful development of a relationship will yield better results.

Besides, no one was going to read your half-assed pitch regardless of where you sent it.

Once a week, I get this message from a complete stranger on LinkedIn:

Since you are a person I trust, I wanted to invite you to join my network on LinkedIn

Ugh.

I’m terrified you put your trust in strangers with a social media humor blog. That’s like putting your internet business in the hands of your friend who tells a funny story about that one time they logged onto AOL back in 1997. it’s not that hard to type a quick one or two sentence introduction.

So, who should be able to send that message? There’s one clear answer. Pets.

Just look at how adorable it is:

How can anyone say no to that?

So, from now on when I get that “Since you are a person I trust message,” regardless of what the avatar is, I’m going to image you are a friendly animal I met in my lifetime. Only our furry, adorable friends should send that message.

People should be forced to use their meager social skills to connect with people so they can further advance their careers. How else are we going to expect them to get ahead if they can’t send an introductory email?

LinkedIn finally gave companies the ability to post status updates to their LinkedIn pages.

Why this feature took over a year to implement, I don’t know. It’s not like they were building an entirely new functionality that will revolutionize the way we interact with brands on a one-on-one, public basis. What year do they think this is? 2007?

What I know is that I really don’t give a crap about companies having another mouthpiece to put more crap in front of me.

What are brands doing for me on Facebook? On Twitter? Nothing. Attempting to get me to buy stuff. Attempting to fix the relationships they ruined with crappy products and services. Now LinkedIn wants to try and fix their crappy hiring process by having job seekers complain on their LinkedIn page?

Please, Betty in HR has better things to do, like make sure you get your meager benefits.

On LinkedIn, all I care about with a company is seeing if I know anyone who works there, seeing if someone in my network knows someone there, or if they have job openings.  I don’t need a company’s latest press release, and I certainly don’t want to start a dialogue using my professional network and profile.

LinkedIn I know you want to be cool like Facebook and Twitter and give businesses a voice. As a publicly-traded social network, you are also trying to answer to shareholders and the businesses that make up your revenue source. But let’s face the facts.

You’re a social network of utility, LinkedIn. People use you because they want their professional life in one place. Focus on giving users the network and tools to succeed in their careers by connecting them with people and companies in real and valuable ways.

What do you think of LinkedIn’s latest feature? Useful? Useless? Let me know what you think. I’ve got to put my latest press release in front of another network.

I was stalking researching a few users on LinkedIn yesterday, when I found something that really surprised me.

You can list your marital status on your LinkedIn Profile.

This profile field seemed absolutely out of place to me. What does my marital status have to do with my business connections? While discussing this with friends, they seemed to think it was more along the lines of a CV than a resume. On one level, that makes sense. LinkedIn is a large, international website that needs to cater to people of all backgrounds.

Still, what does being married have to do with your ability to do a job?

This leads me to to think that LinkedIn is slowly building a dating platform. I’d like to suggest a name of LinkedIn Singles.

LinkedIn Singles would be awesome. You can see everything a person wants about their work history and business sense. You’ll know if other people recommend them, and if they are on the path to success.  You’re no longer trying to figure out what someone’s personality is like based on a few listed interests. Instead, you can make judgements about what they might be like based on stereotypes of their job, how they wrote their profile, and any other interests they list.

Or maybe it would just be really creepy.

Why do you think LinkedIn allows you to list marital status? Do you think it should even be there, and would you date someone from LinkedIn?

Come on people, I want to know all your secret thoughts about your business network.