LinkedIn News Roundup: Leadership tips to Design tricks
If you were to pick just one blog post from our blog to read per week what would it be: a product post, a hot topic post, a LinkedIn Answers post or our weekly LinkedIn News post. The LinkedIn News Roundup is a succinct summary of the press and blogosphere headlines on LinkedIn that surfaced on the web this past week. Take a stroll through this week's 5 highlights and click through to read the posts:
* 37 Signals blog | Design Shack, iSquint and LinkedIn
The 37 Signals blog features a post called "Screens around town", which shines the spotlight on web designs of popular websites based on reader reviews:
Dan Martell writes: “I was impressed with the way LinkedIn displayed the contacts they had found in my old hotmail account, and how I could easily click to the left to narrow the view.”... (Read the rest of the blog post here)
* The Street | "10 Ways for a Leader to connect with an employee" by Marc Kramer
A helpful blog post on how intra-office groups of employees and their employers can leverage LinkedIn to strengthen professional relationships:
Through social networking sites such as LinkedIn, employees can leverage their friends' contacts to open doors and find new opportunities. Employees are starting side businesses to provide a cushion against losing their job or hating their job to the point they want to leave.
The stigma of job-hopping has all but gone away. Good employees have more choices because they are good. The question is what a leader needs to do to nourish, lead and retain the best employees... (Read the rest of the blog post here)
* TIME Magazine | "You are not my friend" by Joel Stein
As the "careerist" networking site, we have always urged our users to take control of their professional brand by leveraging LinkedIn. This write-up by Joel Stein at TIME ponders the art of self-branding via social networking:
But really, these sites (social networking) aren't about connecting and reconnecting. They're a platform for self-branding. Old people are always worrying that our blogging and personal websites and MySpace profiles are taking away our privacy, but they clearly don't understand the word privacy. We're not sharing things we don't want other people to know. We're showing you our best posed, retouched photos. We're listing the Pynchon books we want you to think we've read all the way through... (Read the rest of the article here)
* Freelance Switch | "How to use social networks to find gigs" by Mathias Meyer
Regular readers of our blog must have found these earlier posts on finding gigs for consultants quite interesting (here and here). Here's a similar post that elaborates upon that theme:
The most widespread of them is probably LinkedIn, especially when it comes to business networking.
All of them are based on a simple idea: you know people, and they know other people who might need your services. You’ve probably already gotten a gig through a friend who knows a friend (and so on) in your career. I know I have. Social networks make this even easier and offers much more than just an introduction... (Read the rest of the article here)
* Wall Street Journal (via "The State") | How to make use of LinkedIn
PROBLEM: Receiving multiple invitations for LinkedIn but not understanding the service.
SOLUTION: Set up a free personal account on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com), a professional-networking Web site, to meet other professionals or control e-mail invitations.
Click on “Account and Settings” then scroll to “Receiving Messages.” Select the “Invitations” category, where you can direct invitations to arrive once a week or choose to read them only on the Web site.
You can also upload a private contacts list that won’t appear online (use the “Other Contacts” tab) and choose to receive invitations from only those people. But you could miss introductions and professional opportunities that might arise through other people.
CAVEAT: You should generally receive invitations from people who already know your e-mail address and LinkedIn users who attended the same school as you or worked at the same company. Click on the “I don’t know this person” button to report invitations that violate the rules. LinkedIn restricts ability to send invitations of users reported too often.