Starting today, we bring you the ability to reorder the sections on your LinkedIn profile via drag-and-drop. This enhancement, one of the most highly-requested profile features from our users, gives you the ability to highlight the skills, expertise, and/or experiences that make you stand out.

Your profile is an important part of your online professional identity. At LinkedIn we’d like to provide you with all the tools you need to build and maintain a profile that can showcase your unique professional value. Now you’re in complete control over your professional brand. Given below is a quick demo of how it works:

Want to showcase your work experience or education above everything else? Do you want testimonials from your references to be the first thing people see when they find your profile? Have you synced your WordPress blog with your profile or built a great presentation with SlideShare that you want to feature? Now your LinkedIn profile offers the flexibility you need to put your best foot forward.

Customizing your profile’s section ordering is quick and easy. You will notice that the headers of each of the sections on your “Edit Profile” page now have handles that can be dragged. To reorder a section, all you need to do is click and drag one of these section headers up or down the body of your profile. When you release the mouse, the section will drop into place where you dragged it, and your adjustment will take effect immediately.

The ability to reorder the sections on your profile is just the first of a huge number of enhancements that are coming to your LinkedIn profile in the upcoming months. And, as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions about how LinkedIn can help you to represent, manage, and share your professional identity.

A blog series that gets you up to speed on LinkedIn related posts and news articles from across the web ranging from tips-and-tricks to product news. We’d love to hear your comments both here in the blog post as well as in tweets.  Follow us on Twitter as well.

Liz Ryan from Business Week’s “The Workplace” column has an insightful post for those who’ve wondered why sending in your resume doesn’t necessarily get you that job interview. Liz outlines six different ways you can increase those chances of landing a job interview after you’ve sent in your resume.

Start with LinkedIn to see whether one of your first-degree connections is connected to a relevant person (someone who works in the department where there’s an opening, a peer in another department, or best of all, the hiring manager) in the hiring department. If you do have a two- or three-step relationship to that inside person, ask your first-degree connection to make an introduction for you. (You can do this by clicking on the “Get Introduced Through a Connection” link on your “target” person’s profile page.)

The easiest way to get started would be on LinkedIn’s “Advanced Search” page, where you can search through specific keywords to locate the right contact at the hiring company.

Tips #2 and #3 in the post explains how important it is to do your homework about the company or industry when looking for a job. LinkedIn Company Profiles lets you browse and research companies or even industries that you’d like to work for. Clicking through a company profile shows you current or former employees from that company who you’re currently connected with and can pass your resume to the right folks within the company. For example: check out LinkedIn’s Company Profile.

As Liz summarized, finding a job interview is more a direct result of your attempts to find contacts at that company who can put in a good word for you, and less about how great your resume is.

There is an element of luck in getting an interview, but you can do more than toss a résumé into the hopper and wait for a phone call. You can work assiduously to find contacts who can put in a good word for you, make introductions for you, and fill you in on the issues that are top-of-mind for the employer you’re targeting. When you spot a job you know you’d love and would thrive at, don’t hesitate to call on your network to help make it happen. That’s what your network is there for!

Search your LinkedIn Network for jobs, people and references

This is part of our success story series where LinkedIn users share their best practices on using LinkedIn more effectively to advance their career or business. Today’s user story comes from Thomas Merlino, small business owner at InControl Technical, who discovered how LinkedIn could help his small business grow outside of where he lived.

How I used LinkedIn as a beginner

Never underestimate the power of social networking.  When I first signed up for a LinkedIn account, it was primarily to network with peers in my area.  I am now a small business owner who utilizes LinkedIn as a means to help gain customers outside of our local geographical area.

My business, InControl Technical, was started in February 2007.  My vision was to provide simple and straightforward technical services to the area where I live, work, and play.  I wanted to connect with other professionals and business owners in the local Erie, Pennsylvania area, so I decided to create and administer a group on LinkedIn called LinkedErie.  I, along with some others in the group, promote our individual businesses and discuss everything from politics to the local economy on the LinkedErie discussion board.  It has been a tremendous help to get to know some of my current and potential customers through this group on LinkedIn.

My Aha! moment: How a future client found me on LinkedIn

Soon the time came when I realized another advantageous benefit of social networking and LinkedIn.  While I was working towards building a sizable local customer base and getting our name out there, InControl Technical was contacted by a company out of Greenville, South Carolina.  They found us on the Web by doing a search for “computer repair erie pa” and found my LinkedIn profile that I link to from our Web site.  After viewing my credentials and seeing the recommendations on my LinkedIn profile, the company felt that InControl Technical would be a good fit for their clients in Erie, PA.  The company that contacted us installs and services equipment that is tied in with local servers at various law enforcement agencies.  Based on the recommendations and credentials posted on my LinkedIn profile and the pricing information that is readily available on our Web site, this company felt comfortable trusting us to service their installed server equipment at a reasonable cost.

Since then, we’ve received calls from other companies outside of our immediate area wanting to utilize our services to assist with everything from temporary small projects to dedicated ongoing support for field employees who don’t have access to a corporate information services department.  Without the enormous power and potential of social networking and LinkedIn, I truly believe that the task of expanding outside of invisible geographical walls would be much more difficult to accomplish.
—
[LinkedIn Tip] Optimize your LinkedIn profile with appropriate keywords to be found easily by clients

I’m sure many of you reading this post may wonder how you can reap similar benefits by optimizing your LinkedIn profile for keywords pertaining to your consultancy (both for freelancers or small businesses). For starters, make sure your LinkedIn profile is up-to-date with the latest information on your small business offerings.

For example. Not only is Thomas’ profile summary up-to-date, but he’s also updated the “Specialties” section with a list of keywords related to the technical consulting offered by his small business. You may notice that the keywords he’s added are also localized mentioning Erie, Pennsylvania. This is a great way to come up in search results when prospective clients search for vendors in that particular location. In this particular example Thomas’ profile showed up when the prospective client searched for “computer repair erie pa” and found 14 results, the first of which was Thomas’s profile.

If you’re looking for vendors, don’t stop with basic search. Try advanced people search that allows you to slice and dice across multiple facets including location, industry; even groups that you belong to.

Update your LinkedIn Profile Summary and Specialties now

Kathy Robinson runs TurningPoint Career Consulting, working with mid- to executive-level job seekers who need help marketing their talents, finding interesting opportunities, and getting results in their job search. As a former HR executive, she’s seen the way that LinkedIn has changed the entire process of recruiting, for good. Read more success stories from our users here.

As a career coach, LinkedIn has proven to be a killer app for job seekers whom I counsel, with its immediate access to contacts, groups, events, and thought leaders.

The first thing I ask clients do is optimize their profile, then connect to as many relevant connections as they can, even if they’ve only worked with a former colleague briefly but have a trusted relationship. Other tips? Participate in groups.  Don’t just connect “to” people, but connect “with” people, letting them know what you’re looking for and turning a LinkedIn invitation into a longer conversation.

That’s the approach that worked for one of my clients Christine Midwood, a talented technology program director and product manager. In addition to networking with most of her real world professional connections on LinkedIn, and joining groups, she researched LinkedIn for company information and potential connections before applying for any jobs. She saw a dramatic difference in how many phone interviews or offers she got from traditional online boards (5% response rate) versus online and offline networking (31% response rate). During her search, she made a weekly goal of 3 meetings with her connections, to learn what might be happening in the job market. When she saw a job posting for what is now her current job, she looked up and connected to a former coworker through LinkedIn, who introduced her to the hiring manager. (connect with your former colleagues here)

As Christine found, LinkedIn’s power goes way beyond a profile and some contacts. For example, if you’re interested to know how people broke into a certain field? Look up their backgrounds on their profiles, and find out “how they did it”.

I can’t imagine the job search process for my clients today without the power of LinkedIn, can you? Share your experience in the comments below.

Have a LinkedIn experience you’d like to share with us? Submit your story here.

Whether or not we realize it, we all live and work in a networked world.  Reputations matter.  Relationships matter.  Information is bombarding us from a rapidly swelling variety of sources, with increasing frequency and variability in terms of quality.  Interestingly, people are managing this incredible increase in complexity with habits and business practices that date back decades, if not centuries.

They consider the source.  They consider the context.

Fortunately, in the 21st century, with the birth of the social web, we have tools at our disposal that are orders of magnitude more powerful than we have ever had as individuals or as a society.  To quote David Weinberger from his recent talk at PDF09, Transparency is the New Objectivity:

What we used to believe because we thought the author was objective we now believe because we can see through the author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position. Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.

This change is, well, epochal.

David is talking about journalism, but his insights are at the heart of why LinkedIn is such a powerful concept.  On LinkedIn, the skills that you’ve spent your career obtaining, the experience that you’ve earned, the trusted relationships that you’ve formed – they are all made largely transparent.  Your professional reputation and relationships matter – and not just to you.  That value extends far beyond your profile itself – it carries over to every interaction, every message, and every piece of contributed content.

LinkedIn Recommendations are a great example.

Most people who have applied to higher level educational institutions are familiar with the traditional methods of gathering recommendations.  Finding an advisor, mentor, or teacher willing to fill out a series of questions and write a sealed letter of recommendation.

LinkedIn Recommendations bring liquidity and transparency to the reputation economy.  As a result, the way people evaluate and respond to recommendations is changing as well.

Jeremiah Owyang wrote a post recently about a decision he has made to temporarily stop giving recommendations on LinkedIn.  In his post, he flags a number of concerns he has heard about recommendations and their relative value.  The comments on his post, and the responses on Twitter were interesting enough that it seems worthwhile to capture five of the insights about LinkedIn recommendations I gleaned here:

1. Reputation matters. On LinkedIn, your profile and reputation is tied to every recommendation you make.  As  a result, people can and do consider the source.  Having someone say you are a Web 2.0 visionary is fine and dandy, but those exact words coming from Jeremiah Owyang means something different.
2. Transparency matters. It’s trivial to see how many recommendations a person has given, and whether they tend to write the same things about everyone.  It’s also fairly trivial to see the relationship between the person being recommended and the source.
3. Content matters. Which recommendations a person publishes is up to the individual.  As a result, you won’t find “negative recommendations” (isn’t that an oxymoron?) on the site, any more that you would expect a person giving references for a job to give you people who think poorly of them.  However, recommendations speak volumes in terms of what they do and don’t say. Check out this recommendation for Peter Thiel from Reid Hoffman:



Detailed characteristics, specific achievements, highly credible and relevant source.  That’s what you want to see.

4. Recommendations are often mutual. Is this really a surprise?  Most productive, informed positive professional relationships are mutual.  As a result, most people will, in fact, leave recommendations for each other.  The fact that you’re own reputation is tied to any recommendation you write is an incredibly significant incentive to keep words honest and defensible.
5. Requesting recommendations is normal. Think about this for a second.  Who are the people you most value professionally?  Do they know it?  More importantly, do others know?  In a perfect world, we would all proactively make sure that the people who have earned our trust and respect knew it, and that others knew it as well.  But we’re all busy, and the task rarely feels urgent.  That’s why, for literally centuries, most recommendations have been requested rather than spontaneously given.

As food for thought, let me challenge you to consider the following:

In this economy, more than ever people are realizing that the most important assets they have are the skills and experiences they have earned, and the trusted relationships they have formed.  As I mentioned above, we all know great people who deserve our public recognition.  They deserve the benefit of our hard-earned reputations, applied to endorse theirs.

So I ask each of you to take the time to select three of your connections who fit this description, and write them a LinkedIn recommendation, unsolicited.

My guess is that not only will the experience be rewarding for them, but it will also significantly rewarding for you.

Kevin Nichols is a Sr. Litigation Paralegal, President & CEO of KLN Publishing, LLC.  He’s also a columnist for The Globe Newspapers in the East Bay, and he writes for various publications nationwide.  As an active LinkedIn user, Kevin also moderates two LinkedIn groups, one of which he used to pull off a networking event for free. Check out his experience below. You can also find other stories from our users here.

LinkedIn is the premier social networking site for business professionals. It is the most consequential tool that I use to reach my business goals. As the moderator of the Downtown San Francisco Networking Group, I organize monthly and quarterly events for professionals who work downtown to network to create business opportunities for them.  I am personally concerned that a large percentage of our group is unemployed due to the economic downturn, some for almost a year! So, I decided to organize an Employment Symposium that will focus on improving resume writing skills, interviewing tips, how to prepare for, how to dress for, and how to follow up an interview. Because these individuals are unemployed, cost is of paramount concern. Skeptics suggested that this may take at least 3 – 4 months to plan and cost thousands of dollars.  Here is how I have use LinkedIn to organize this event for free in a month, like I have done for all of my previous events for my group.

First, I needed a location that could hold at least a hundred people comfortably so I updated my status indicating such. Within minutes, a colleague – Janine Mixon, Dean of Student Affairs at Golden Gate University – said that she might be able to get me space for no charge. Through my networking group, Janine introduced me to her colleagues David Javate (Assistant Director of Sales) and Ami Readdy (Recruiting and the Associate Director of Business Career Coaching), who both agreed to allow us to use their facility for free, provide resource materials, career guidance and placement information, etc. as parting gifts, assistant with obtaining panelists and with completing the planning.  After another status update, I obtained two businesses that agreed to sponsor the food for the event. Finally, upon searching through my LinkedIn contacts, I have leaned on my Fortune 500 recruiting contacts to donate their time by being panelists / facilitators. The moral of this story is, “Use your network to make the impossible, possible”.

Have a LinkedIn experience you’d like to share with us? Submit your story here.

This is a guest post from our user, Linda Ruck, who runs her own Public Relations and Event Management consultancy in Singapore, Linda Ruck Communications (LRC)  with “a focus on personalized service”. In this post, she shares her best practices on how LinkedIn helped her win three global clients for her small business. You can find more of our user stories here.

Being a small business owner carving out a niche against the big players is very challenging. As with any small business you need to develop viable strategies, seek out opportunities and be creative on how to promote your business, all with a limited budget!

My LinkedIn profile has attracted clients and generated leads and referrals from the US, UK, Australia and throughout Asia seeking to hire expertise to organize their events or run their media and PR campaigns in Singapore and the region.

LinkedIn has proved to be an excellent marketing tool for LRC and more importantly has given me a global presence. My first success though LinkedIn was when I was contacted by a multinational company based in Boston which required a PR consultant in Singapore to support their Asian expansion plans. The company searched LinkedIn to find a PR company in Singapore who had expertise dealing with US based companies. LRC was one of a few companies short listed and after the initial contact and several conference calls they picked my agency to run their inbound media campaign. Having a robust, up-to-date LinkedIn profile definitely helped. Since then I have worked with this company every time they have had a project in the region.

Through opportunities in Linkedin, I have also worked with a $500 million company in the UK who contacted me through a respected mutual Linkedin contact to do their inbound media campaign in Singapore. We were also successful in winning the PR project to launch lavera, the fourth largest organic skincare company in the world.  And we have worked with several other multinational companies listed on LinkedIn, who either found us through common introductions or the LinkedIn’s advanced search.

In addition to my robust profile, I also actively participate in relevant user groups on LinkedIn. Groups is a great platform to engage in discussions and connect with like-minded professionals to learn and share, whether it’s for business or personal interest. And, most importantly, helps establish my thought leadership in a space I’ve carved out for myself as a small business owner.

Linkedin has definitely helped make my company, Linda Ruck Communications, a global player.

Have a LinkedIn experience you’d like to share with us? Submit your story here.

[Ed. note: This is a guest post from Kathy Steele, Vice President of an integrated marketing firm that credits networking as the key to their growth, and who discovered how vital social media sites like LinkedIn have become to their business process and success]

I have to admit for a number of years I was under-utilizing the resources on LinkedIn. Recently our company has joined the conversation by embracing social media as part of our integrated marketing plan, and now we work with our clients to establish Web 2.0 strategies.

We use LinkedIn to leverage the experience of our group members, vet ideas, create new connections and re-establish relationships to increase sales and publicize the achievements of our clients and ourselves. We have even found that in our sales process, sending an InMail has garnered a much higher response rate than using email or phone contact. We have just found that when we send InMail vs email we have been getting a response in the same day where we may have had no response in the past. In addition, we have also been able to be more prepared for a meeting by viewing a contact’s profile in advance. This has had significant impact on the timetable of our sales cycle, particularly in the cases when we respond to a blanket RFP or quote.

More recently, we’ve also found ourselves on the speaking circuit more often thanks to a LinkedIn Poll. By responding to a LinkedIn Poll we were found by the Chicago Tribune who asked us to weigh in on social media best practices. Recognition in the article has helped secure three new speaking gigs, which wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

We are so impressed with the results we are spreading the word! We have been speaking to groups of CEOs, affiliations and chambers about how to use LinkedIn as well as other social media tools in their marketing mix. Social media messaging takes time and commitment, but the return has given us credible visibility and exciting new opportunities to present our capabilities to interested prospects.

[Ed. note: This is part of our success story series where users share their tips and tricks on using LinkedIn more effectively. Today's user experience comes from Dan Gellert, a Grammy award winning audio mixer, engineer and producer. He's also the co-founder of Jitterbug.tv that he started with his partner recently, a venture that LinkedIn helped them greatly with]

Building the technical backbone of the site, I asked the LinkedIn community to comment on best practices for streaming media, advantages of different media players, budgeting bandwidth costs, etc. Taking advantage of the eyeballs and expertise on LinkedIn, the answers enabled me to understand the average mode of operation; and more importantly, gave me the vocabulary and right questions to ask moving forward on a variety of topics.

Moving to logo and brand design, through launching and especially now, marketing and spreading the word – LinkedIn has helped me waste less time on areas I am not an expert in.  Finding people who are influencing the kids music niche has been fairly easy using LinkedIn. Scanning peoples profiles, what and how they write quickly gives me a sense of their direction, expertise, involvement and relevance to me  – now that is useful!

As we started defining the navigation of jitterbug, LinkedIn was one of a few sites I referenced – noticing how it made potentially messy navigation simple and clear gave me understanding… and a bit of hope!  Adding my profile link on outgoing emails to people who I am trying to woo into action – I found this adds some credibility for those who need some prodding.

The fact that LinkedIn has a huge user base and that you can cross reference users answers with their profile – for me, this makes the experience transparent and helpful.

Have a LinkedIn experience you’d like to share with the community? Please submit your story here.

Austin Arensberg is the Business Development Manager for Prime Energy Investments, a private renewable energy investment fund. My primary responsibilities are to identify and screen potential investment opportunities across multiple countries in Southeast Asia and China.

LinkedIn is one of my favorite tools to gain market knowledge and meet key industry contacts that lead to actionable investment opportunities. I particularly enjoy participating in discussions within groups, where I have learned about country-specific regulations, new promising implementations of clean energy technologies, and local conferences and events to expand networking opportunities.

Recently I wanted to learn more about companies building renewable energy power projects utilizing methane gas from landfills in China. At the time, I frankly knew little of that industry in China. Before I even began researching on Google and through relevant trade journals, I found and joined the Waste Management & Recycling Professionals  group on Linkedin and posted a discussion asking for investment proposals. The response was tremendous and within a few hours I was speaking on the phone with various professionals each with over fifteen years of experience in the industry in China. While normally getting access to market experts takes significant time, LinkedIn’s groups offered me an invaluable yet comfortable medium for interested parties to quickly connect and share knowledge.