I’m reading through the post on the LinkedIn professional headline and Peter Osborne’s great feedback to those who have left comments (I’ll probably close the comments in a while).  One thing that jumps out is … how to put this… BORING.

Why is it boring… that’s the question I’m asking myself.  Perhaps it is boring because it reads like this:

Jargon cliche boring jargon boring cliche fancy-pantz just-like-everyone-else.

If you have it in your professional headline, or your summary, or your email message, or your ___________, it makes you sound:

• like everyone else
• boring
• cliche

Jargon is useful in certain places (perhaps where everyone speaks the jargon), but NOT in marketing yourself or your product.

Go through your profile, and the last few emails, and your email signature and see how much boring, cliche jargon you are spewing.

Then, change it

Yesterday I wrote about LinkedIn Professional Headlines as a marketing opportunity and said you could put yours in the comments and “I (we?) might critique it.”

Then, I buckled down and went to work on some big deadlines.

THEN, people started putting their headlines in…. I critiqued three but had to get back to work.

That’s when Peter Osborne, creator of Consultant Launch Pad, jumped in.  Peter has executive experience and has written some very smart responses to people’s professional headlines… I still plan on going over and weighing in, but I have to get some other work out of the way.

For now, if you want yours looked at, you might still have a chance – leave a comment on THAT post

So many times I see LinkedIn Professional Headlines that … well, suck.

Yours probably sucks (unless you got my LinkedIn book or my LinkedIn DVD, as I talk about this quite a bit in those).

Here’s a quick test:

(a) Does your LinkedIn Professional Headline have your TITLE?

(b) Does your LinkedIn Professional Headline have the name of your company?

If it has either of these you have a great chance of having a sucky professional headline.

Why do I say this?

1. The title doesn’t tell me a whole lot.  If it’s a big title in a small company I’m not impressed.  If it’s a regular title in a company or industry I’m not familiar with, I might not really know WHAT YOU DO.
2. Beyond that, though, your title doesn’t tell me WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?). I don’t care that you are a CEO, or analyst, or any of that other stuff.  If I SHOULD care, I can find that in the rest of your LinkedIn Profile, right?
3. Use your Professional headline as a change to educate me on why I should care about you.  Title/company doesn’t do it.
4. With regard to the company, most companies I see out there have cute names… that mean nothing to me.  They are not branded enough to tell me anything.  Thus, putting the name of a no-name company in your headline does not help me understand your value proposition… IT ONLY TAKES UP SPACE.

How’s your LinkedIn Professional Headline?  Leave it in the comment and I (we?) might critique it

I was checking out a friend’s LinkedIn Profile and noticed he had some quasi-bullets… I’ve had this on my list for a long time but never get around to doing it on my own Profile, but I thought I’d steal 3 minutes from my schedule and throw something up really quick.

First, though, the caveat is that you can’t have REAL bullets.  That is, a bullet format where the bullets (usually dots) are in one column and the data is left-aligned in another column.  What this means is that if you write a long point after a “bullet,” the text will be under the bullet point (as opposed to under the text.

Here’s what I added – my bullet was a CHECK MARK, although you can use various symbols:

Notice for the last word, where the arrow is pointing, the word LINES is not under I EAT, it is under the symbol (that’s why I call it a quasi-bullet).

It is  simple to do this…. you can go to my profile, or any profile that has this, and just copy-and-paste the symbol into your profile.

I’ve seen stars and other symbols… if you have seen it on other profiles you can copy it to yours.   I can’t remember what these symbols are (I googled ascii symbols but I don’t think that is it)…. anyone know?  If we can figure it out I’m sure there are dozens or gabillions of symbols you can put on your Profile.

Oh yeah, lest you think this is anything new, check out this post I did back in 2008, with some other symbols…. thanks to Lisa Hendrickson (callthatgirl.biz).

LinkedIn has a great opportunity to clean up spam on its network… it would be a very simple enhancement that would help the community self-police.

On a LinkedIn Profile page, on the right, there are a bunch of links:

The closest they get to deleting a contact is to “report profile photo as…” but that is not exactly what I want to do… I just want to delete a contact.

My suggestion, obviously, is to put a link right there to delete the contact.  Even Facebook allows you to “remove” a “friend” from the friend profile page… but on LinkedIn I have to:

1. Click on Contacts,
2. Click on Remove Connections (from the top right of that page),
3. search for the name (and hope I don’t choose the wrong person, if the name is a common name (in this case, this morning, it IS),
4. …. OH WAIT!!

No, it’s not a connection I’m dealing with!  It’s someone who’s in the same LinkedIn Group!

Now I’m really hosed.

Okay, two issues here… first, make it easier to remove the connection from the profile page.

Second, if someone from a Group spams me (blatant, obvious spam), allow me to somehow report it, block messages from that person, etc.  I’m not talking about a Group Discussion, I’m talking about blocking the person (like Twitter has: block and report for spam).

I’m not an advocate of becoming more like Facebook or Twitter, but these are two options that I really think need to be implemented, to protect the integrity of LinkedIn as a system.

LinkedIn Applications – which ones do you load, which ones do you ignore?

I’ve not been a big fan of the Amazon Reading List application, in general. I think people generally put… well, what they are reading.  This may not be on-brand, and essentially becomes NOISE on an already-too-busy LinkedIn Profile.

I recommend people load this if they can identify some books that support their personal brand… but for the most part that isn’t what I see.

Here’s an instance, however, of a Reading List that I LOVE… can you tell why?

Thanks Ross, for sharing my LinkedIn DVD with your network!

Here’s a simple question that a lot of people mess up.  Many times I’ll get an email that says “will you check out my LinkedIn Profile, here’s the link: http://www.linkedin.com/myprofile?trk=hb_tab_pro”

Actually, that IS NOT the link to YOUR LinkedIn Profile… what they did was they went to their LinkedIn Profile and then copy and pasted the URL to me… see the red arrow:

The right LINK to share, if you want someone to see your LinkedIn Profile, is down a bit… scroll down to the bottom of all the main stuff… it is just above the LinkedIn Summary… this is the link that you actually want to share (this can go in your email signature, on your business card, etc.):

If this helped you then you definitely need to order my LinkedIn DVD.

I’m working on my third book, titled Eight Lunches.  It’s a cool idea and I’m actually looking at people to review the latest draft (more info and an excerpt here).

While I’m asking for people to review the draft and provide feedback that can help the book be more solid, I’m using LinkedIn for business development.  I mean, er, marketing.  I mean, perhaps PR.

What I really mean is I’m using LinkedIn as a tool to help me network into certain places to help me market my book.

I’ve identified a number of media outlets I want to approach with information about my book.  Last week I did a few simple searches on LinkedIn to find editors and writers of one magazine and came up with about a dozen contacts I’ll reach out to.  Here’s what I did:

• I searched on “editor [magazine name]” and came up with a bunch of names.  Most of the names are interesting to me.
• I went to each LinkedIn Profile to learn more and see if they really were a contact who I want to network with.
• On the right of each Profile I looked in the “Viewers of this profile also viewed…” box to see who I was missing, or who didn’t come up in the search, or who key people were at other magazines.  This is a KEY area when you are searching for contacts you might want to reach out to.
• I recorded the name, location (so I know what time zone they are in – not all are in the same time zone), title, URLs (always the LinkedIn URL, sometimes the Twitter URL (if they are on Twitter), and the name of the magazine (because I’ll put these contacts into a spreadsheet and then import them into JibberJobber – I figured it’s best to put the “company” name in before the import, rather than one at a time).

This week I’ll work on my message (aka, pitch) and then send them messages.  But I won’t send them messages through LinkedIn… I don’t have any introductions left (I can’t find the outstanding 5 that should be recalled – it’s a horrible weakness in LinkedIn to not be able to find those), and I can’t InMail them because I’m on the free level now.

That’s okay, a simple google search shows me that the company email structure is simply the first initial of the first name plus the last name @magazinename.com…. I’ll check out the magazine to make sure that’s what they say in there, but emailing each of them individually should be easy.

As a side note, I noticed that ALL of them have weak/skeleton LinkedIn Profiles.

Every once in a while I hear the question: how do I get 100% on my LinkedIn Profile.

My answer?  It doesn’t matter.

If you really want to know, here’s an article you can refer to.  I don’t know if this is accurate information, and I think it has changed over time.  It will probably change in the future… so it’s a moving target (which means, 100% today might be 95% tomorrow).

What’s more important than having a 100% Profile?  I think it’s more important to (a) be findable, and (b) have a compelling message.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, get my LinkedIn DVD.

I got an email from a friend in Washington state asking why there is someone in her LinkedIn Company page that she doesn’t know.  This is a very small company, she is an owner, and she would clearly know who she has hired and/or paid.

The way you end up in a Company in LinkedIn is simply to add the company to your current (or past) employers.  In your Profile just say whether you do or did work there.

It’s that simple.

Here’s the company page for Oneicity, the company in question:

When I click on the “marketing engineer’s” profile, I see this:

I have no idea why that person put that company in their profile, but just by doing it they show up on the company profile page.

I think LinkedIn needs to put some kind of QA in place so the Company admin can approve people, and/or take people out…  on the other hand, a company might keep it too scrubbed (which won’t be good, and will ultimately negate the integrity of the information showing).

The challenge is not trivial… what would you suggest LinkedIn incorporates?