LinkedIn 101 - Even If You're Not Job Hunting
Open-Source Everything
By Patrick O'Malley
You've seen LinkedIn. You've uploaded your resumé like everyone else. But, you're not searching for a job, selling anything or networking on the Internet, so you don't see the point of it all. What's the big deal? Really, you're just confused and bored.
You're not alone, and it's not your fault-LinkedIn Corp. doesn't make it easy for you to understand the power of its site.
I'm going to show you, though, a different perspective on LinkedIn, with two different ways that you can use it, even if you aren't job hunting or selling.
Getting in Touch
Put in the names of some of your friends or work colleagues from the past, and you may find a lot of them have profiles on LinkedIn. The site has about 30 million members, which is about 40 percent of the number of people who use work computers every day. There's a good chance your old friends can be found on LinkedIn.
I reconnected with my roommate from college, and now have dinner with him once a year. (He still owes me money from a phone bill 20 years ago.) I have also reconnected with many other high school and college friends and literally dozens of co-workers from previous jobs.
Here are a couple of my undiscovered "Missing LinkedIn Tips."
- Put your maiden name in your profile. One way to do this is to make it part of your first name. Angelina Jolie Pitt got married, so she changed her last name. In her LinkedIn profile, she put Pitt as her last name, but I never would have looked for that, since she got married after I lost touch with her. However, since she had set up her first name as Angelina Jolie in her LinkedIn profile, I was able to find her. I may never have found her otherwise. Alternatively, you can put it in the Summary field.
- Keep a list of the people you don't find. You will want to try again at some point in the future.
Keeping in Touch
Once you are connected to someone through LinkedIn, you should be able to find them forever, so it is a very powerful way to keep in touch. If they change jobs, phone numbers, addresses or names (as they get married or divorced), they may be too busy to notify everyone. However, they will eventually change their e-mail addresses in their LinkedIn profiles, so you should still be able to get back in touch with them. This makes LinkedIn a very powerful Rolodex or stack of business cards.
LinkedIn can be a much more powerful tool, if you want to use it for networking, searching for business partners, job hunting and sales. But if you don't need those things right now, it can be useful just for finding old friends or colleagues and keeping in touch with them. By the time you decide you need it for networking reasons, you will have already built a good network of trusted contacts.
PATRICK O'MALLEY is a keynote speaker and corporate trainer who talks to people about LinkedIn, Facebook and Google advertising. He was previously the vice president of operations for Northern Light, a search engine site. He does not work for LinkedIn. His Web site, www.patrickomalley.com, contains many LinkedIn tips and videos, and more LinkedIn tips can be found on his blog at www.the-linkedin-speaker.com. He will be a speaker at MPI's 2009 MeetDifferent event, this month in Atlanta.