Bloomberg Businessweek
Go To Businessweek.com
During the past 20 years, the author has watch China move from being a developing country into an industrial superpower
Money Moves, 5/24: Chocomize Co-Founder Fabian Kaempfer talks with Bloomberg’s Deirdre Bolton about the business of customizing chocolate
The president's campaign has a new rule—no cell phones allowed
In honor of remote control inventor Eugene Polley, we recognize other influential but neglected inventors who have felt the sting of stolen glory
Forget Adderall. Traders now pop chia seeds to stay focused and energized
The Italian automaker and others are adding hybrid technology to elite cars
The storied bridge that links San Francisco and Marin County changed the face of California
Schools cultivate ties with startups before they're big successes
Dave McClure's traveling venture capital show scours the world for promising startups
(page 2 of 3)
Additional Information: Your profile’s Additional Information field lets you round out the “Story of You” with the URL for your website and/or blog, your Twitter account, honors and awards you’ve won, and your interests (the books you read, the sports you play or follow, or anything else you want to share).
Personal Information: You can list as little or as much personal information as you want on your profile. It’s your choice.
Education: Including accurate dates in the Education section of your profile will make it easy for the LinkedIn database elves to match you up with classmates who may be on LinkedIn now, waiting for you to reach out and refresh the connection.
Contact: The “Contact [Person X] for:” section toward the bottom of your profile is another great field because it forces you to think about what you want from LinkedIn and from your networking in general. This is where you get to decide which types of contacts you want and don’t want. Which conversations are you willing to have, and which ones are a waste of your time?
Applications: You can attach Box.net files to your profile in order to showcase events you’ve produced, articles you’ve written, or photos you’ve taken, or to append a full-text résumé to your profile (for instance, if you’re a graphic designer and want to show off what you can do). I could write multiple articles about LinkedIn Applications, but for now I’ll just say check them out.
Your LinkedIn profile is in great shape. Now all you need is a network. Here are four tips for bringing your crew back into reach or converting 3D friends and contacts into LinkedIn connections.
Connections: Look for the green Add Connections bar on nearly every page of LinkedIn. Use this link to invite folks to join your first-degree network. In most cases you’ll need their e-mail addresses. If LinkedIn gives you the opportunity (some invitation channels do, and some inexplicably don’t), change the standard boilerplate invitation language to sound more like your own voice. Be wary of sending invitations to people who aren’t expecting them—you could lose your invitation privileges that way.
Colleagues: The Colleagues feature lets you quickly see which LinkedIn members have worked with you during your career. That’s incredibly handy because we can easily forget people, and we often don’t have current e-mail addresses for our long-ago workmates.
Address Book: If you have an address book on Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, or another popular e-mail application, you can download your entire contact list into LinkedIn. Don’t panic—LinkedIn won’t send spam; it will just tell you which of these contacts are already using LinkedIn.
Classmates: Just as the Colleagues feature does, Classmates lets you reconnect with people from your past. Invite people to join your network via the Classmates channel with caution, because this is where LinkedIn invitation spam tends to congregate. A helpful reminder in the body of your invitation (“I remember how much fun it was traveling to Tel Aviv with you in 1993.”) can help refresh the memory of classmates you haven’t been in touch with for a while.
My last eight LinkedIn tips will get you using the site actively rather than sitting around waiting for people to reach out to you. Try one a day and build up your LinkedIn chops from “novice” to “cocky” status by next weekend.
People Search: Use the People Search link in the upper righthand corner of nearly every LinkedIn page. (I’ve had no luck whatsoever with the quick-search feature; I use Advanced People Search, however, several times a day.) You can search the LinkedIn database on every imaginable field, from a person’s name or industry to his or her virtual proximity to you. Searching LinkedIn is a free and easy way to build up your business-intelligence acumen and data warehouse. Try it!
