I have stayed away from writing about acquisitions that LinkedIn does because of a few reasons. Either they didn’t make too much sense, or because the acquisition didn’t seem to add much/any value to the average user, or because I wanted to focus mostly on using LinkedIn, not so much what’s happening with the company.

Speaking of happening with the company, tomorrow is Cinco de Mayo, aka, LinkedIn’s birthday!

Back to acquisitions.

LinkedIn acquired Slideshare for $119M, apparently (details here).  I find this really interesting.

I think Slideshare was doing fine on their own.  And they are the #1 application I say everyone should have on their Profile.  Two great companies, offering awesomeness to customers.

I don’t understand WHY LinkedIn would make this acquisition.  I put on my MBA/strategy hat today to try and figure it out, and the only thing I could come up with was this: LinkedIn wanted to ensure that they had complete control over this technology and offering, and didn’t want to worry about Slideshare’s potential strategic changes, or, in case they weren’t healthy, Slideshare going away.

Honestly, I don’t know.

Nonetheless, it’s not my place to speculate. I think these are two great organizations, and acquiring Slideshare only means that it should continue to be an integral part of LinkedIn.

What does this mean to you, the user?  Not much, but I stand by what I’ve always said: YOU NEED TO DO A SLIDESHARE PRESENTATION ON YOUR PROFILE.

Check mine out here (I’ve had my slideshare presentation towards the top of my Profile for over a year:

I was at the library yesterday with some time to spare and was flipping through the Forbes magazine and saw that Reid Hoffman was worth about 2.1B. (right now on Forbes it says 1.8B… Give or take a few hundred million, I guess)

That is over two thousand million dollars.

That’s amazing.

He’s 44 years old. Let’s say he lives to be 100. He could spend 35 million a year and still have money left over (assuming he isn’t investing it… otherwise he could spend a lot more and not even touch his principle).

I know people have a problem with rich people, but I applaud him for making a fortune.

My name is Jason. I go by Jason.  You can call me Jay (or, “J”), but hardly anyone does.  Rarely I’ve been called Jase.

I don’t really care… call me whatever you want.  Most people just call me… Jason.

But what about people with names that are commonly nick-named?  William (Bill), Jonathan (Jon, Jonny, etc.), Rebekah (Becky), Penelope (Penny), etc.??

I try and call people by the name they typically go as.  When a telemarketer calls me and uses my first name (which is NOT Jason), I immediately know they are not my friend… because no one except telemarketers call me by my first name.

So, I’m sensitive to what I call people.  Is it James or Jim? Some people really, really care!

Here’s a trick I recently tried, and it worked!  Scroll down and look at the Recommendations.  I was reaching out to a James, wondered if it was a Jim, and found that every single Recommendation he had addressed him as James.

Mystery solved, thanks to the Recommendations

I’ve been contacting people in my LinkedIn Group. Even though I’m the owner of the Group, and I’ve seen the group member’s name at one point, LinkedIn won’t show me the full name if they are not in my first or second degree network.

There are tricks to get around this. Here are two I’ve used today:

1. Copy and paste the Professional Headline (most people let LinkedIn decide what this is, the title and company) and do a Google search. Every time I’ve done that I’ve found the person, and their email and phone number
2. Go to the website of their company (not hard to find) and search around there – about us, our staff, etc.  Easy as pie.

It’s frustrating that there are so many dead-ends on LinkedIn, but there are usually good ways around them… between Google, Facebook and Twitter you can dig deeper and get what you are looking for

I am just about sold on doing an about.me profile.  I wanted to do a critique to follow up from Tuesday’s LinkedIn Profile Critique on Jeff Dibble. This is on his About.Me page:

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Here’s my critique: I LOVE THE WHOLE THING.

The picture (you can’t see the whole thing in this snapshot… to the right is a golfer) is peaceful and non-distracting (not too busy).

The text is awesome.  The only thing I’d love to see is the “let’s talk” show his email or phone number or something like that (you can click on an email button below, but you have to scroll down (I missed it the first couple of times).

I don’t have anything bad to say… the whole thing is awesome.

Great use of About.me!

Here’s another LinkedIn Profile Critique.  If you want one I charge $100.  Just let me know if you want it. (the LinkedIn Profile Critique I do is more complete than what you see below)

I work with Jeff.  He has been selling one of my systems into university career centers for the last few months.  We communicate quite often… so this critique is a bit different… I know Jeff more than the other people I’ve critiqued on the blog.

Here we go!

1. I like the picture… it’s perfect.  What do I look for here?  How close-up the headshot is.

2. Name: perfect.  I would prefer to see “Jeff” instead of “Jeffrey,” because I think that’s what he always goes by, but simple firstname lastname is perfect.

3. I am not in love with his professional headline for a few reasons.  I want a simple sentence… his isn’t.  There is jargon, cliche, and almost all words are first letter uppercase…

4. Below his picture, the quote/status is okay, and on-brand with who he is and how he helps organizations.

5. The current title doesn’t do it for me.  Jeff is a professional in the university space.  Who is going to search for a “founder” or “principal?”  He should have key words or key phrases of what he wants to do (marketing manager, marketing director, etc.) in his title.  Same issue with past titles.

6. Why does he only have 4 recommendations, but over 500 connections?  Seems kind of low to me…

7. Websites: he needs to have three, AND he needs to have better descriptions.  For example, instead of “About Me,” it should say something like “More about me,” “What I’m about,” or better, “My Marketing Manager Profile” or something like that.

8. Two Twitter accounts… cool stuff, but both accounts seem to be inactive.  Here’s the hard part – figure out a Twitter strategy to get more content up. Scratch that… when I right-clicked on the Twitter buttons to see what he had, it showed the last two tweets… making me think his account was inactive…

9. Public Profile:  good job getting the vanity URL

I like what he wrote in his Summary, but I know him, and I’ve talked to him enough to know what he’s talking about.  If this was from someone else, I would question what much of this summary means.

Also, much of what he writes seems cliche… I would like to read stories, or get examples of how he thrives, builds, sparks energy, etc.  I know Jeff has a lot of people who would validate what he’s saying… I’d like to see quotes from them in his Summary, about him.

Without reading anything he wrote, this seems to be too busy.  I don’t like the uppercase (which I’m guessing is compensating for not being able to bold the text), and I don’t like the *****… this part looks to busy, and not easy to read.

Personally, I would not show all of these Groups. I would hide any Group that is not on-brand, or supportive of how I can bring value to YOU (my target audience).

Well, with one exception. I think the Make A Wish foundation is awesome…. keep it there

Have you ever gotten a weird request to “recommend” someone on LinkedIn?  I have a fairly large network with people I don’t know (usually they have read my stuff, or heard me speak), and every once in a while I get an email with this:

So, what do you do?

My first inclination was to feel like this person was spamming me, OR that they were asking for something that they shouldn’t have (“no, I can’t recommend you – we never worked together, and I’m not going to make something up!”).

Then I realized that this happened because there are a few places on LinkedIn that make it easy for you to blanket-request your network to give you a Recommendation.

In other words, this person probably just hit a button that said “ask people for a Recommendation”…

Therefore, I figure, he doesn’t even know he asked me.  It might have been a mistake, or he might be uncomfortable knowing he asked me (since we don’t know one another)…

I figure it was an honest, easy-to-make mistake, and I do one thing:

I delete his message.

I don’t write back and lecture him, or ask him for more information… I simply delete it.

And, because they don’t know they even sent me the request, they don’t miss anything from me.  It goes away.

So, my advice is to just delete the request (if you don’t know the person) and just move on

I’m surprised at this lockdown, and LinkedIn’s response.

Problem: You can’t copy and paste from anyone’s profile.

Solution: (at the bottom of Glen’s post, the instructions are to turn off Javascript on your browser).

Read full post here.

Working on the THIRD edition of LinkedIn for Job Seekers DVD… so I’m digging into LinkedIn features a bit more this month.

LinkedIn Skills.  Hm.

I didn’t care much about them until December, when I was in Minneapolis doing 14 keynote presentations (in 4 days!!) and one of my hosts was really excited about LinkedIn Skills.  I decided to learn more about what it was, and why she was excited (she is a resume professional and career coach – more from her later).

I’ve dug in and found value out of LinkedIn Skills.  It launched in beta  about a year ago (seems to have been launched in February of 2011).  It seems to still be in beta.

Skills is not showing up in the general search drop down, nor is it in the advanced people search.

It shows up between “Experience” (where you have your work history) and “Education”… I like how each skill is hyperlinked and takes you to that skill’s page… but I think it’s wierd taht some skills are front-and-center (ballet, salsa, etc.) and others aren’t standardized yet – meaning, they aren’t there.  Specifically, “product manager” wasn’t there, but Salsa dancing was.

So, are people not using this?

Like many things on LinkedIn, there can be immense value here, but it might be different than what LinkedIn hoped.

In a nutshell: use Skills for industry/professional research, to learn more, understand the landscape, etc., but I wouldn’t get overly excited about putting skills on my Profile.

BONUS: Want to know who’s behind LinkedIn Skills?  Check out this blog post, and the commentor Peter Skomoroch, “(Lead Data Scientist on LinkedIn Skills)”

Check out what I see now where I once saw my video:

It’s not a surprise, really. I have had emails regularly from people who wonder what happened to their slideshare app, or box.net app, and presentations app.

I tell them it’s probably buggy, and to contact LinkedIn customer service… that’s really all we can do.

Darn