Three months ago I wrote LinkedIn Maintenance: Do This Right Now (or else), strongly encouraging you to back up your network (export connections in Linkedin) and download your profile as a PDF.  I got 49 comments on that post, and a bunch of bloggers shared it.  I didn’t mean to use a scare tactic, as I think those are generally lame, but the story about Susan Ireland’s account getting deleted (or, becoming inaccessible) by LinkedIn is a reality that most LinkedIn users won’t want to face.

Today I want to present Part II of LinkedIn Maintenance (or else) to you.  If you don’t do this when you read my blog post, don’t call me asking to help you - because I won’t be able to.  First, the story:

I got a desperate email and few voice mails, and then finally connected on the phone with a recruiter.  This is someone who has read me, known about me, heard from me, etc. for over a year.  She was practically in tears, and clearly distraught.  She had built her LinkedIn network to over 1,500 connections, and used it religiously in her work as a recruiter.

Can you imagine taking all the time and making all the effort to build a network that big, and using LinkedIn on a daily basis as she did her job?  LinkedIn is to her what a hammer is to a carpenter.  Critical.

She ended up leaving her employer.  And shortly after, probably within 24 hours, her LinkedIn account was… GONE.

Wait, it wasn’t totally gone.  This is scarier than “gone.”  From what I understand, here’s what happened:

Her boss must have done a “forgot password.”  Since her primary, and ONLY email address on her account, was the corporate email account he provided her, which he now had COMPLETE control over, he was able to login as her.

And he changed her LinkedIn password.

And he changed her vanity URL (from her name to his name).

And he changed the name (the one at the very top of your Profile).

It looked 100% like HIS account.  But there were two problems:

1. All of the 1,500 connections were connected to this new, bogus, fraudulent account.  Sounds like a HUGE breach of privacy/security to me.  And embarrassing and disrespectful to the lady, who had built the relationships.  Not to mention the complete disrespect for each of her LinkedIn connections.
2. All of the recommendations had HER name, not his.  He couldn’t change that.  If I happened upon the Profile I would have guessed it was a bug in LinkedIn.

But it wasn’t a bug.  It was a fraudulent situation.  I said, “YOU DIDN’T READ MY BOOK!”  Because in my book I say, MAKE SURE the primary email address is one that you will have 100% complete control over, like a gmail account, or Yahoo, or AOL, or Hotmail, or something like that.  The second address in your account can be your employer’s address, but it should NEVER be your primary address.  NEVER!

That’s it… no more story, no more writing about this.  GO NOW to your LinkedIn Profile, click on Account & Settings, then on the right click on Email Addresses, and the rest should be obvious.

If you want more info on using LinkedIn, you can buy my book or follow the I’m on LinkedIn — Now What??? blog.  I blog regularly over there.

Please, go do this NOW.

Here’s a funny story.  Yesterday I was doing some research for a project I’m doing for MarketingProfs.com (one of my favorite online sources of information).  I somehow went to Southwest’s blog, Nuts about Southwest, and was interested to see they have a bunch of participation in social networks.

I was especially interested in the LinkedIn Profile, since you aren’t supposed to have a Profile for a company, rather an individual.  I clicked over and found it was the CEO’s Profile… and had an idea.  Since LinkedIn reviewed Guy Kawasaki’s profile, and that’s been a huge hit (gets great search results, and is usually at the bottom of some pages within LinkedIn), what if I reviewed Gary Kelly’s Profile?

So I did - you can see the Southwest CEO LinkedIn Makeover here, on my LinkedIn blog (I titled it Nuts About Southwest, But Not Gary Kelly’s (LinkedIn) Profile).  It was fun to write ;).  And then I tweeted it, specifically bringing it to the attention of whoever the Twitter person is a Southwest:

I got THIS reply back within a few minutes:

Now I think that’s pretty funny/cool!

Blogging + Twitter got something I wrote on the desk of the Southwest CEO?  I’d say that’s a pretty cool story, maybe even showing some of the value of Twitter!

Have YOU gotten any value out of Twitter?

I’ve never done it this inexpensive before, and I won’t do it this inexpensive again. Now’s the chance to get in on a smoking hot deal. I’ll copy the text from the sponsoring organization’s blog post:

Sign up for the special Social Networking bundle–LinkedIn, Facebook ($35.00 special)

The social networking bundle in October 2008 includes the two workshops listed below, and can be purchased online at:

————-> Register online now ($35 special)

• Workshop 1: LinkedIn in Action, Monday October 6, 12:00 to 1:30 pm
• Workshop 2: Facebook in Action, Monday October 20, 12:00 to 1:30 pm

They are made available for a nominal registration fee of $35.00 (this includes both workshops). This is a special one time offer and seats are limited. You can order up to 10 seats.

PS: Please note that People-OnTheGo offers a number of public and corporate workshops. Feel free to e-mail us at training@people-onthego.com if you have questions, or if you would like to discuss bringing the workshops to your team.

We look forward to your participation!

If I were a good salesperson, I’d have upsell and back-of-the-room stuff to sell during this webinar.  I don’t have that, just my two books… so don’t worry about getting pressured into anything on these webinars.

This is going to be awesome, and if you’ve ever sat on the fence about listening to me speak or present, now’s the time to do it.  The first webinar is on Monday, so book it now.

Last week JibberJobber was the first thing mentioned on Fox News (My Fox Gulf Coast / Fox 10).  Here’s the description:

On Monday’s Daily Dot Com, Charissa Cowart shows you a website to help you organize your job search materials. She also tells you that you can find video memories of Yankee Stadium on the Yankees website. Check out the websites here.

Here’s a link to the clip (click on the image below):

Want to know how it happened?  I met Charissa Cowart on Twitter, we exchanged a few tweets, she checked out JibberJobber, and the rest is history. 

What, you say, Twitter is lame?  It worked pretty good this time  Thanks a bazillion Charissa!

Online networking allows you to meet lots of people who you otherwise wouldn’t be able to meet.  Instead of one-to-one networking, you can do one-to-thousands networking, and still have some level of intimacy.  You can enhance your brand as a thought leader or subject matter expert, and learn from the best minds in a particular space.  You can do it on your own time, from your own house… and you don’t even have to brush your teeth or comb your hair before you start!

Offline networking allows you to develop intimate relationships one-on-one where you can communicate with passion and excitement communicating with your voice fluctionation, body language, facial express, and touch. It’s a great opportunity to really get to know people, learn about their quirks, needs, desires, etc. in a setting where you both can devote your complete attention to one another.  You can put your best foot forward and guage reactions immediately.  And brushing teeth, combing hair, getting dressed up and actually talking with other human beings is a good thing

Of course, there are draw backs.  Online it’s easy to trust someone who isn’t who you think they are.  Not getting a timely response might lead you to draw wrong conclusions.  Information overload grabs at our attention, and we can easily communicate something that is misunderstood (without being able to immediately know it’s misunderstood).  It’s sometimes so easy that we overextend ourselves and drown in information and contacts, not really able to do anything but flounder.

Offline networking is a challenge because we have to dedicate time and gas money to travel to and from, sometimes pay for event or meals, go to an event where there aren’t enough of our target contacts (or there are too many, and not enough time), and my biggest challenge, weighing the opportunity cost in the in-person networking vs. what I could do from my office.

So which is better?  Either may be more appropriate for different objectives, but both can and should be used in a complementary strategy.  Don’t choose one or the other - do both.

This post is brought to you by Cindy Kraft , the CFO–Coach. Cindy Kraft is the Personal Brand Strategist & Career Coach for senior-level Finance Executives who are ready to repackage and position themselves in order to Land their next opportunity! Career offerings include marketing document development, brand strategizing, executive coaching, and online identity positioning.  Cindy Kraft is a JibberJobber Career Expert Partner.

I got an e-mail from Susan Ireland, at the Job Lounge.  She asked me if I knew anything about LinkedIn deleting people’s accounts… I’ve heard a little about this, but mostly just hand-slapping for looking like spammers.  Getting an account deleted can be a huge problem, especially as you use LinkedIn more.

She writes about it here (I can almost hear a tear drop on her keyboard as I read it… ouch!!!).

The two issues are (1) why she was deleted, and (2) what LinkedIn can/will do about it.  I have no idea why she was deleted, and apparently she doesn’t either.  As far as she knows, she wasn’t doing anything wrong with her LinkedIn account, or LinkedIn connections.  As far as what LinkedIn can or will do, here is their response:

“At this time we do not have a recommended back up system for your account. Once something has been deleted there is not a back up at this time to recover any information. …One thing you can do is copy your profile information and save it as a word document so that you will always have it on your computer.”

Not very comforting, is it?

Here are two absolute must-do’s, right now, on LinkedIn - and they will take less time than it takes to read this blog post (so do it now!):

1. Export your contacts. Simply click on Contacts, scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click on Export Connections, and follow that process.  Just leave everything at default and you’ll end up with your connections in a .csv file, which opens in Excel.
2. Export your profile. You’ve probably put a fair amount of thought into creating your profile, right?  What about any references you have gotten?  Simply click on Profile, then find the grayed-out icons above your name, and click on the adobe pdf icon.  This exports your profile, including recommendations, into a very nice, presentable document (kudos to whoever at LinkedIn did that formatting, it is very well-done!).  Here’s an image of where the icon is:

These are the two most important things for me to grab, if I knew my LinkedIn account might go away.  (1) Who I connected with, which includes e-mail addresses very every single contact, (2) my recommendations  (I can always rethink and recreate a profile, but those recommendations are priceless!).

Please, don’t even take 2 seconds to comment on this post, just head on over to LinkedIn and do this very easy, very quick maintenance!

I am frequently asked “how old is LinkedIn,” and my response lately has been “I don’t remember.” Here’s an easy way to remember - LinkedIn started on May fifth, five years ago. Happy birthday LinkedIn!

On their birthday blog post they show some interesting stats, announcing LinkedIn is over twenty-two million users (more appropriately would be “signups”), and their staff has grown from ten people five years ago to almost three hundred people today.

Also on their blog post you’ll see the two founders, Reid Hoffman and Allen Blue. I thought that Konstantin Guericke was also a founder. Note that Reid is the Chairman of the Board (and President?), working with current CEO Dan Nye. Konstantin moved on to found and run Jaxtr, but Allen Blue is still in active management at LinkedIn, apparently as VP of Product Strategy.

I started on LinkedIn during my last job, although I forgot about that account and actually created another account during my job search, a little over two years ago. So I’ve probably had an account at LinkedIn in their first two years - how about you?

I’m frequently asked if I’m an employee or evangelist of LinkedIn. I respond that I am not. I think LinkedIn is a great tool for professionals, and that you can get a lot of benefit from having a good profile and a decent strategy on LinkedIn… but I realize there are issues with LinkedIn. For now, though, I say, ride the wave!

What are the problems? I won’t go into them here. Heck, Scott Allen, author of The Virtual Handshake didn’t go into them on his post where he talks about backing off of his LinkedIntelligence blog. His point #3 is titled “LinkedIn is doing some things far worse now than they were two years ago.” Well, I can’t tell you what they were doing two years ago because I really wasn’t paying much attention. And if they flew me out to their Silicon Valley office I’d be happy to talk about what I think they are doing wrong now, and what they could do to improve, but that is … well, about as likely as me going to the moon.

Nonetheless, I still think the tool should fit into your personal branding and networking strategy… as one component. If you haven’t started yet, or at a loss on what to do, check out my book. If you don’t want to pay the 19.95 + S&H, download the eBook for just 11.95. After reading it you should be able to wrap your brain around LinkedIn and know how it would fit into your your overall social strategy.

Again, happy birthday LinkedIn - we’re anxious to see what the future has in store!

In March I read a post by Lucian Beebe, Director of Product Management, called Get Your Inside Connections with BusinessWeek & SimplyHired. I was simply jealous at the very cool interface that BusinessWeek offered to their readers, and immediately sent an e-mail to the address at the bottom of the post asking how we could do the same thing.

Thankfully, we got a quick reply and were able to give this functionality to YOU. How cool is that? A huge THANKS to LinkedIn (and the LinkedIn API) to help make your experience richer! Here’s how it works:

First, you get real data when you are actually logged into LinkedIn … so go login to LinkedIn! If you don’t login to LinkedIn, you’ll be prompted to, like in this picture:

Next, log into JibberJobber and go to the Company List Panel. This You can get there by clicking Companies on the main menu (or, in the image below, click on the link in the QuickView Stats for your Target Companies).

Next, on the right side of the List Panel you’ll see all the icons. You should see the little “in” icon (if you don’t, click Manage Columns and add that icon). Simply click the in icon and you’ll see a popup of who you know at that company, like this (these are the contacts that I have that have eBay in their profile… based on my connection relationship with them… so your results will look different):

Finally, you can drill down to any of the options they show… which goes to LinkedIn’s page, and shows as search results.

Again, thank you LinkedIn for opening up and allowing this type of functionality - it really does make the web a richer place!

I almost titled this “how to screw up your brand,” but you know, that kind of strong language would be off-brand for me :p

In the last three weeks I’ve received three comments, all from different people, on this blog.

All comments kind of, almost, add to the discussion, and enrich the original post or surrounding comments.

When I went to approve the comments in question, I kind of hesitated, but ultimately thought, “well, if they want to leave something that stupid, it’s on their brand, not mine.” It’s almost the “give them enough rope to hang themselves with” idea.

I approved the comments.

And then I started to see the very same comments posted on other blogs in the career or recruiting space. No editing, no customizing, just a straight copy-and-paste job.

So here’s the deal - I saw a yellow flag by the overly-self-promoting comment… but decided to let it fly. I figured my readers are smart enough to see through the crap.

But then when I read the very same stuff in multiple places, my initial concern was validated.

Guess what? As a blogger, you have gone backwards on our relationship. Instead of being flattered and grateful for you adding to my discussion, I’m now mad that you are “using me.” And insulting my readers.

You have tarnished, or screwed, your brand, as far as I’m concerned.

And I’m sure my readers are smarter than you think. I bet you’ve tarnished your brand with them, too.

Why the uncharacteristic rant?

Because I travel around telling people to comment on blogs to enhance and develop their personal brand. But please be cautious about how you do it. Follow these guidelines:

1. Don’t be self-promotional, unless it’s clearly warranted. If you have a solution that is right for the topic, great… let us know about it. Otherwise, save your pitch until the timing is right.
2. Don’t insult me, as the blog owner. I’m okay if you disagree with me, for sure. I’m okay if you think I write something dumb, or unwarranted. But don’t try and pick a fight with me, and try and smear me. Of course, this might be what you really want to do, but if you are interested in nurturing a relationship with me, or enhancing your personal and professional brand, it might pay to take a breath and keep it nice. Also, I, like most bloggers, have built a community of readers. Sorry to say, but they like me. They support me. They are my champions and my evangelists. You might think I’m full of hot air, but they think I’m pretty cool. And they’ll stick up for me.
3. Don’t ever insult my readers. You might think they are yours to preach to, but they are pretty smart and can see through your crap.

What am I missing? What have you seen diminishes the credibility of a commenter?

Last night I got the umteenth e-mail asking me what I think about Naymz.

Naymz is a site that I have recommended, based on a friend’s recommendation, as a tool to help you claim more of your online profile.

Theoretically it is a site that helps your name come up on a Google search … at least, that’s the way I understood it.

I finally signed up for Naymz to check it out. I was discouraged by two things:

1. Of course, like social networking sites, they wanted me to invite all of my contacts to the network. The problem with this, in my opinion, is that if I do this, I’m strongly endorsing Naymz to my contacts, which I’m not in a position to do yet. Plus, I might recommend it to a few people, but I don’t want to do a blanket endorsement to all of my contacts (some of whom I have a strong (or weak) relationship with).
2. Just by filling out my profile I get points. Want another five points? Put what country you are in (but don’t put USA - they don’t like abbreviations)! Want another five points? Put what city you are in! Hold on… I want privacy (well, you know what I mean :p)… this idea of getting points is a yellow flag for my skeptical side.

My understanding is you get more points, which makes you more credible (ie, the more points you have, the more real/genuine/trustworthy/??? you are… ??).

Instead of discouraging anyone from using this, I’ll throw it right back at you - what do you know about Naymz? Is this something that has helped you, or that you recommend? How or why?

If you are interested in reading more about Naymz, here’s some buzz in the blogosphere:

• Liquid HR writes Naymz.com business model and context
• Favorite Online Resources writes Naymz Reputation Network
• Technology Evangelist writes A Stalker Enabled Social Network (note, his argument applies to LinkedIn, too. Read the comments on that post to figure out how to “resolve” it, if you are concerned (I’m not))
• Web 2.0 Weblog writes What The Hell Is This Naymz Thing?