Check out this cool post by Steve Duncan titled You need to look at more profiles.  Steve talks about how he got on someone’s radar just because he looked at her LinkedIn Profile…

Are you looking at enough Profiles of key people you want to network with? Or, do you check out the people who are looking at your LinkedIn Profile?

I am on a newsletter that Marc Freedman puts out where I learned about an Irish startup, Goshido, that got it’s first round of financing by using LinkedIn.

Only LinkedIn.

And they apparently closed the round in eight days (having been looking at financing for the last 4 years, I find that impossible to believe, but I don’t know what they did).

Read the Irish Times writeup here, or the Business Insider writeup here.

One sentence stands out:

“Clearly, LinkedIn can be used for more than just making contacts and recruiting — it’s a lucrative opportunity for business growth as well.”

That is absolutely right.

You can see his post titled: The Misrepresenation of the Power of Social Media – here is his (and my) contention:

5. If you’d like to increase your personal network be sure to link to [name withheld] directly,I have more than 12 million connections, and will gladly share them with you.

Oh. My. Gosh.

The MORE contacts you tell me you have the less value I think you bring me.  If you tell me you have a lot of contacts I immediately think:

1. Do you have a relationship with ANY of them, or are they just a number for you, helping  you to get to a billion?
2. Do any of them know who you are, or to them are you just a LinkedIn spammer or LION or some other vague connection.
3. Are you communicating with any of them?
4. Are any of them relevant to you, your business, or me and my business (since you are insinuating that having those connections will bring value to me).
5. Do you have any idea how to process any information from 12 million connections?
6. Have you ever done a search, or done anything to tap into the value of those 12 million contacts?
7. ________________________________

I mentally shake my head.  Worse than thinking “so what” I think “you have no idea what you are doing.”

Sure, I’m assuming here, and I could be totally wrong.  But I’m with Thom Singer on this one.

Have the connections, but don’t brag to me about it, or I immediately think you are a noobie.

LinkedIn made some big interface changes, and I have to change the LinkedIn for Job Seekers. I was going to start recording the next version in March but I think it’s time to start it now.

Starting today I’m cutting the DVD price in half (if you purchased it for full price in the last 30 days you can take advantage of any of the specials below).

The new price for the Version I LinkedIn DVD is $25 + S&H.

Here are the bundle options:

• and/or  Add the book for $19.95 (no additional S&H)
• and/or  Add the Version II LinkedIn DVD (should ship in April) for $25 (no additional S&H)
• and/or  Add 6 months of premium JibberJobber ($25)

Or get all of this, which has a list price of $175 for only $89.  If you do all of the options above it would be $95 + S&H, so the complete bundle is a good savings.

Click here to purchase, and please tell your networks about this.  This offer is good while the Version I DVDs last.

I recently announced a new monthly program I’m doing to share what I’ve learned about social marketing.

Each month I’ll focus on a different thing – LinkedIn, video, Yahoo and Google Groups, articles, Twitter, etc.

We’ll go in-depth… and address your needs (as well as we can).

For more information, and the monthly schedule, check out the announcement on my Jason Alba blog.

If you have any questions, contact me.

Check out this blog post by Barbara Safani… it is notes she took from a presentation in NYC by Brian Tietje (Sales Manager for LinkedIn).  The post is titled LinkedIn Job Search Tips From the Pros.

#7 is:

Don’t worry about upgrading to the paid level of service. This level is designed for recruiters and marketers, not job seekers. LinkedIn has an enormous amount of utility for job seekers at the free level of service.

Interesting… I tell job seekers to not upgrade, however, about a year ago I was comped an upgrade and fell in love with the upgrade features. Why? Because I started doing more prospecting on LinkedIn, and the features were right for me.

When I wasn’t using the searching and communication as much (which I do when I prospect), these upgrade features weren’t as important.

If you are a savvy senior-level professional who is really going to use LinkedIn, I bet you’d get good value out of the upgrade.  If you aren’t ready to really use it yet, you probably won’t.

I’ll be renewing my upgrade…. but I might try an experiment first (going to free to see if I can find any pain that makes me want to upgrade).

By the way, if you are still trying to figure out what the heck you should do on LinkedIn, get my LinkedIn DVD.  You’ll know what you can and should do after watching it.

For a few years I had owned LinkedInHelp.com and LinkedInHelp.net.

Today I finished transferring them to LinkedIn, the company.  If you want LinkedIn help you’ll have to go to their help resources.  I hope that someone there jumps on it and redirects the link instead of letting it drop (especially since it’s been live for a while and some people might have been using it).

I didn’t transfer them because I wanted to… I did it because (a) it was the right thing to do, and (b) they sent me a nasty, cold letter (email) telling me I better transfer it to them or else.

I don’t care for “or else,” so I transferred it.

In the course of transferring and communicating with them I actually got a real communication from a real LinkedIn employee – so I took advantage of the opportunity and asked “what’s with being a “relationship company” but sending that really cold, impersonal, and even threatening email to me?”

I’m nobody special to them, but I do think I’ve helped them increase visibility and credibility.  Not a reason to give me special treatment, but man, that letter was disturbing.

This was not-a-fun process, but it ended nicely since I got to spend some time on the phone with the LinkedIn guy – I asked him why it was such a cold letter and he said “let’s get on the phone and talk about this.”

Very classy… thank you Mr. ____ from LinkedIn, for making that a pleasant experience.

To read the letter, and some very passionate thoughts (on both sides of the fence) on this issue, you can read LinkedStrategies.com post titled: LinkedIn: Are You Crazy! referring to LinkedIn dude Sean Nelson. Luckily mine didn’t end like that

I was reading The Daily Machete’s blog post titled Networking Resoultions for 2010 and saw that my buddy included one resolution about LinkedIn:

I resolve to update my LinkedIn status once per day and, if I’m not on LinkedIn.com yet, I will sign up immediately.

There are five resolutions on that post – you should be able to come up with your own five.  I’ll share five of mine specifically for LinkedIn:

1. Submit questions in LinkedIn Answers more frequently. At least once a month.
2. Answer questions in LinkedIn Answers more frequently. I do this when I have down time, like in a hotel, at conferences, or when working on a brainless project… but I don’t do it enough. I won’t do it with lame, short, meaningless answers, though.
3. Change my status at least every other week. I think Machete’s suggestion to do it daily is too much… I don’t want to hit my network that often (if they want to get more frequent updates they can follow me on Twitter).
4. Review and update my LinkedIn Profile. I know there are areas that can be beefed up.  Disregard the 100% complete measurement and make your Profile compelling and strong for humans, not for LinkedIn’s algorithm.
5. Figure out how to get more value out of Groups. I’m disappointed and excited about the power of Groups… this year I’m going to wrap my brain around it and really figure out how to harness the power.

What about you – what might your LinkedIn Resolutions be for this year?

I’ve been thinking about prospective users of LinkedIn for a while and continue to ask myself how’d I’d answer the question:

Jon is a line worker at a manufacturing plant.  Or a miner.  Or a ________. It’s a blue collar job.  You find blue collar jobs differently than you find white collar jobs… why should Jon get on LinkedIn?  Isn’t that overkill?

So what do you think?  If you have a cousin (Jon) who just got laid off from a blue collar job, do you think LinkedIn would be a great resource for him?

A few weeks ago I started to get emails from people asking me what I thought about the new LinkedIn interface.

Huh?

I didn’t have a new LinkedIn interface.

Now I do, though.

Two thumbs up. I like everything about it. It feels cleaner, it seems there’s more room, and it focuses on my data, as opposed to navigation.  Good stuff.

Oh wait, there is one thing I’m surprised at.

My two favorite features, Answers and Companies, are NOT in the main menu.  I’m amazed, actually, as I think these are two of the first things you need to interact with, and they are in a secondary menu.

Weird.

Oh well… overall, two thumbs up.

(How does this affect the LinkedIn DVD?  I’ll update it sometime but for the most part all the stuff I share is current… just some menu stuff is moved around)