LinkedIn Quick Start Tutorial by Patrick O'Malley - learn to set up a profile in 15 minutes

 

LinkedIn Tutorial – another “Pat Trick”, and it’s free.  It's one of my “Missing LinkedIn Tips”, and that's a cute title.

Summary:

• Do yourself a favor.  Join LinkedIn.com by going to www.LinkedIn.com, but take 5-10 minutes to read my ideas below to save you time.
• Its free, and I get nothing out of having you join, but you will.
• It only takes 5-10 minutes to do a basic sign up
• total time invested – 15 minutes
• Here are some LinkedIn training tips, written using my friend Kimberley Minardi at Pepsi as an example
• Over 20 million people use it, so you’d be amazed who you can find

Details:

They call it “MySpace for adults for business”.

It allows you to keep in touch with people you've worked with before, which helps with getting jobs and business, especially for people who would be highly recommended by previous colleagues.  If you put in all of the emails or names for old contacts, I think you’ll find that about 25-50% of them are in there.

Let me know if you need help with it, but here are a few tips. 

1. Do a minimal amount of effort to set up your profile initially
1. Set up your Your professional “headline” carefully
   1. these are the two lines that everyone will see when they see a brief description of you
2. Advanced tip: in the regular summary field, put in common misspellings of your name, like Kimberly Minardi, without the “ey” at the end of Kimberley, since people may look for you and get the spelling wrong
   1. see mine for an example
3. Put in abbreviations, too, because LinkedIn isn’t currently smart enough to tell that Vin is an abbreviation for Vincent, for instance
3. Put maiden names, aliases, names from the witness protection program, etc into your Summary field
2. Later, put in very brief descriptions of your jobs and years
1. Minimize the time you spend, but put in names of companies and you’ve worked for and the years (don’t bother with the months) you worked there, so that people who know that you worked for Pepsi will say, “that’s the same person”
2. You don’t need to put in full resume details until you get a lot of free time, and I probably never will
3. Put in very brief descriptions of your schools, and only if you want to
4. Look briefly at someone else’s profile, like mine, Patrick O’Malley, as an example
1. Put my name into the search box beside where it says Search and People
2. Look at the line after my name which is called the "Professional Headline"
   1.  This is all most people will see if they see a brief description of you (as someone else’s connection, for example)
3. Click into my profile to see an example of one
4. Note also that you could find me under the misspelling Patrick O’Mally
5. Advanced tips:
1. Think about how other people would look you up
   1. This is probably the most important rule, and requires that you think about things like misspellings of names or multiple names to use to describe a company
      1. For Digital Equipment Corporation, also put in DEC
      2. For the University of Massachusetts, also put in UMass
2. Put in alternate email addresses like your home or personal email address
   1. In the upper right hand corner of Every page, it says "Accounts & Settings"
      1. On the right, under Personal Information, click on Email Addresses, and add in your home and/or personal address
   2. put in personal email addresses or email addresses from old companies, since people may look you up using those addresses
      1. discontinued ones, like Kimberley.Minardi@moltenmetal.com, can’t currently be used to find someone, but I am pleading LinkedIn to allow it, since people might still have those addresses and might use them to try to find you
      2. this is especially true if they put in a bunch of old contact emails
3. Click “View My Public Profile as others see it” in the upper right hand corner of screens to make sure it looks like you want others to see it
   1. The top couple of lines, “Your headline”, is the most important part, because that is what people see when they see you are a “connection” through someone else.  It should contain a good 10 words summary of what you want people to know.
4. Under “Edit Your Public Profile”, change “Your Public Profile URL” so that it uses your full name
   1. This also helps you get listed in Google
5. Put in a picture of you if you have one
6. When you have time, and want to add people
   1. On the left hand side of the screen, in the green box, click "Add connections”
   2. On the right hand side, you can click a couple of buttons to add in email addresses
      1. Click "Check webmail contacts", and you can
         1. add in the contacts from your accounts at Hotmail, Aol, Gmail, etc
      2. Click "Don't use webmail?", and you can
         1. add contacts from Outlook, ACT, Lotus, Apple Mail
         2. any file with email addresses in it
            1. this sometimes works if they are in a variety of formats, but sometimes it doesn’t
               1. for instance, if you give it a line of email addresses separated by commas, it appears to only take the first one on the line
               2. therefore, it may be a good idea to count how many email addresses you pass to it, and confirm that it is getting them all
7. Look up old friends and business people that you haven’t heard from in years
1. Try ones with unique names like Ray Duchemin or Larry Ockene, since it is unlikely that there are multiple entries with that name
2. Tip
   1. there is an advanced search, and it allows you to put in a zip code and only find people near there, which is useful to find local people
   2. it is annoying that you can't p[ut i the name of a city - you must figure out the zip code for that city
3. I found
   1. my Godchild’s father, who I had lost contact with
   2. people I worked with at Dec, Digital Equipment Corporation
   3. people in the association DECUS
   4. people from Ziff/IAC/Thomson
   5. my old college roommate from Cornell, Larry Ockene
   6. other people from college
   7. people from Northern Light
   8. friends from my college fraternity
   9. people from Divine that I’d lost track of
   10. an instructor that I worked with 20 years ago, Ray Duchemin
   11. training clients from 20 years ago
8. If you want more or have questions, let me know
1. I’m a LinkedIn junkie now, and love helping people with it
9. Note: See Upcoming Events page for LinkedIn seimnars I will be doing.

For more information about booking Patrick O'Malley as a Linkedin speaker, email patweb@patrickomalley.com or call 617-PATRICK.

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Note that

• I do NOT work for LinkedIn Corporation, and am not affiliated with LinkedIn Corporation in any way.
• LinkedIn is not spelled Linked In