The CareerZine

Leveraging LinkedIn for Online Branding

Most senior executives are relatively new to the social networking and the social media wave sweeping both the business world and that of professionals in transition. The reaction of some has been one of skepticism and disregard for the value it could offer, and reasonably so. How could a forty million person networking site replace the valuable contacts they already have in place with fellow C-level colleagues? It can’t and it shouldn’t.  They can assume that they already know who they need to know and those contacts will open doors and introduce them to others. 

It is understandable that high performing, highly successful professionals who have gotten all their positions through colleagues, mentors and connections may not understand the value of LinkedIn to their brand. LinkedIn’s most overlooked and obvious function is to augment our brand with free online publicity in the world’s largest yellow pages known as Google.  Every executive needs to build their professional brand visibility online because that’s where everyone goes to snoop on their background and track record before meeting them. According to a 2007 survey by executive networking firm ExecuNet reveals that “more than 80% of executive recruiters said they routinely use search engines to learn more about candidates”.   Doing a Google name search brings up first and foremost a professional’s LinkedIn profile because of the way Google has set its search algorithms.

I suppose one could leave it to chance as to what comes up under your name on Google but why take that risk when a few simple steps can immensely improve your online first impression and professional brand by creating a compelling professional profile on LinkedIn? 

Creating Your Profile as a Marketing Brochure

LinkedIn is not your resume, though it is designed to entice you to think thus. Falling into the long chronological litany of a resume-style profile on LinkedIn does not do anyone’s brand justice. Leave out dated and irrelevant work experience to focus attention on the most salient part of your experience. Do not go into long detail rather keep the descriptions to titles and companies and perhaps a one-liner overview of your scope of responsibility. But do use every feature, application and tool offered by LinkedIn as they makes sense for your particular situation. 

Writing a Branded Summary

 Many make the mistake of omitting the Summary portion in LinkedIn by simply not noticing it in their rush to fill the work history portion that LinkedIn provides.  Others resort to dumping the top part of their resume into that section.  As it bears the same category title (Summary) often used at the top of a resume it may appear to be a logical thing to do but it is not good branding. A well branded LinkedIn Summary reads more like a narrative that one would read about a conference presenter, or the back of the flap bio of a book author.  It is engaging, personable and interesting not a dry litany of canned business buzz words about P&L, M&A, negotiations, revenues, product launches, market share, cost cutting- data that every top performer can recite. That’s not to say this information is not necessary but it needs to be couched in branded terms that differentiates you from the other executives in this economy seeking the very same opportunities that you are.

Making Recommendations Count

For an accomplished executive, employed or unemployed, to have a litany of recommendations on LinkedIn may at first blush appear overkill, redundant, or vainglorious. Your reputation stands without others having to reiterate or reinforce that one is highly competent, qualified, successful and proven. Or does it?  This is certainly a situational decision unique to each person on the quantity, type and character of the recommendations that they use on LinkedIn or not. However, more often than not, others are better at extolling our virtues and accomplishments than we are. Further, recruiters readily admit to being more interested in what others say about potential candidates than what the candidate says about his or herself.

Just as importantly, writing selected recommendations not just for those who ask but unbidden for those who count will boost your brand in the process. If you are connected to high profile, well-placed, powerful business professionals that you know on LinkedIn, then saying good things about them reflects well upon yourself as well as builds their appreciation.

Using Applications to Demonstrate Your Unique Abilities

Fred R. Barnard in Printers' Ink, 1927, promoting the use of images in advertisements said that, "One Picture is Worth Ten Thousand Words."  We could add that Amazon book recommendations, SlideShare presentations, Google Doc white papers or Typepad blog posts will do the same for your LinkedIn Profile. Rather than using hundreds of words to describe your talent, abilities and uniqueness, providing actual demonstrations will make a more credible impression. The applications serve as testimonials to what you say about yourself. In December 2008, LinkedIn launched its Applications which are simply links to professional tools accessible to anyone online.

Those who had been blogging using Typepad or Wordpress, posting slides to Slideshare and articles to Google Docs just had to click on the LinkedIn buttons to make them show up in their profiles. For the rest of us, it is a process of expanding our presence online using these social media tools and then linking them back to LinkedIn. It is definitely harder to ignore blogging when it can build your brand value on LinkedIn.

 You Say It’s Your Birthday?

After six long years discouraging people from posting any personal information such as an address, or phone number, last month LinkedIn created a section called, yes, Personal Information.  You now can announce the date of your birthday, marital status, address and phone number.  Leveraging this new category into brand building is of dubious merit at the moment. It seems more like your effort should be in avoiding the pitfalls of that arise from giving personal disclosure such as age discrimination, and invasion of privacy.

Using the Polls and Events functions to ask people to vote on business issues or let everyone know of upcoming events you are attending makes more business sense than providing the date of your birth. Since LinkedIn seems to have a solid relationship with Google, then videos and photo galleries cannot be far behind.  We had better start preparing our YouTube channels now.

The bottom line, personal branding using LinkedIn is a constantly moving target with new tools, widgets and applications to use that didn’t exist a month ago.  We are challenged to take what will work for each of us to grow and expand our image, visibility and self-marketing online.  

Career Management: The Resume is Dead

Did the title catch your attention and draw you into the article? Now that’s a good headline, the way yours should be written under your name on Linkedin. I am sure you know the kind: a real zinger, catchy, enticing, yet professional and not boring like a job title and company name would be.

The title, however, was not intended to entice you but merely to announce what will soon be reality.  Perhaps it is somewhat of an exaggeration but not by much. Let’s modify it: the resume as you and I know it will be extinct, obsolete, and dead in less than 3 years - expedited by the recession.  Yes, that’s safe to say.

What would cause that? How many times have you printed and mailed by regular post your resume to an employer or faxed your resume recently? However, there are multiple copies of your resume are online, including BlueSteps,  and posted on job boards (as ineffective as they are who can resist them?) as well as emailed resumes to companies and colleagues who forward them by email to others. It is the evolution of technology has created the change in our actions.

The Resume as Webpage

When does it stop being a resume and start being a webpage? It already has because it is primarily read on a screen. Nobody prints it until you walk in the door and by then it has done its job, right?  Terms like a one page resume and stacks of resumes are all obsolete because there are no stacks or pages, just databases and links.  How can you measure the length of document that has links to multiple other sites of information (see insert below for example)?

But, it is simply insufficient to have a resume remain as an online pseudo page on a screen.  If that was the case, we would be buying our subscription to the New York Times online, ads and all – with no more newsprint on our fingers.  It is obviously not such a simple trade off.  Resumes, like many products and services the Internet has touched in the past 20 years, are being transformed by the inherent nature of the technology.  Marshall McLuhan was right.

"The medium is the message" is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. The phrase was introduced in his most widely known book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964.^[1] McLuhan proposes that media itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study. He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself.
Wikipedia, 2009

In the Web 1.0 days the Internet was populated with what was called euphemistically “brochure ware and shopping carts,” meaning datasheets, brochures, and catalogs. The Web 2.0 Internet, due to enhanced tools and delivery capability, has enabled multiple kinds of content modalities. 

On a Web 2.0 website, you may watch a video, listen to a podcast, move through a set of slides, download a PDF file, fill out a form, take a poll,  add a comment,  share in a chat,  add a friend, send a text message and RE Tweet. Can a resume remain for long a static script of line after line of text in this environment?    

What are the implications to your job search, and to managing your career?  The resume as we knew it is functionally obsolete online. Web 2.0 technology demands that we shift from our traditional preconceptions of what a resume should look like, and how it should be accessed.  This is no trivial trend to be dismissed. Given the global competition for work and the commoditization of talent at all levels, how well you use Web 2.0 tools to brand and differentiate will give you the edge.  Here are some initial ideas and areas to help you to step out of the resume box.

 

Visualcv

If you want to see the Web 2.0 replacement of the resume, just visit www.visualcv.com . Interestingly, the term curriculum vitae or CV for short means a written account of one’s life. A resume is a condensed presentation from the French past participle, “résumé”, to summarize. 

Visualcv doesn’t expect a summary of your abilities, and accomplishments but rather a well- branded elaboration multimedia expansion of them. It allows you to build your self-presentation using video, audio, graphs and charts, slides, photos, illustrations, articles, white papers, and work samples. In addition, you can add logos of your current and former employers, links to blogs, and relevant websites, testimonials and endorsements.

There are other sites that offer similar services including Emurse, Doodlebit, WebResumePlace, and InteractiveResumeServices. Some, like Emurse, can’t seem to move past the notion of a resume as a piece of paper, while the others go the distance. Whatever it is called:  a visual vitae, professional portfolio, webfolio, it certainly is no longer a resume as we know it. 

Linkedin.com et al

This 6 year old granddaddy of the online resume website, has slowly but surely seen the light and moved to expand your opportunity to present a full-blown professional profile. With the addition of the Applications feature late fall of 2008, Linkedin expanded member Profile pages to encompass a breath and depth of someone’s abilities and accomplishments beyond its initial fill-in the blanks modules.

Overnight, you could upload slides and presentations through Slideshare and Google Presentations.  You can now link Google Docs to your Profile that enables white papers, work examples, case studies, and articles to be displayed. Amazon book lists lets you display your knowledge and acumen through sharing all the great books you have read.

Another Applications feature is the blog links to Wordpress and Typepad. I already had a blog and a newsletter on the Typepad platform, thus my blog posts and articles were easily linked to my Profile with one mouse click.  Displaying knowledge of your industry, marketplace, and business by blogging about it is a natural extension and enhancement to your professional profile.

The sum total of all these Applications is that it transforms Linkedin’s original fill-in-the-blank, static, linear Profile cum resume into an embellished, expanded and elaborated professional portrait providing a wealth of information and deeper insights into a professional.

All of the above applies to the other social networking sites with variations on the theme. Be it Facebook, Viadeo, Ecademy, Xing or Orkut, any social networking site expects you to present a profile of yourself to the world.  Wherever you have the opportunity to communicate, demonstrate, share and connect online, you are putting your persona and professionalism on display. It is the new resume.  It is at your peril that you avoid doing this because recruiters, hiring managers and search firms are seeking talent more in those sites. You can be selective, discriminating such as building visibility on sites such as BlueSteps but you still have to show up.

 

Zoominfo.com

Zoominfo should be separated out for two reasons. One, recruiters seem to love to peruse it as they expect to uncover a more candid expose of a person. Two, you are on it already so you have no choice but to manage your professional presentation on the site.

Zoominfo uses the same type of software as CardScan that scans information off a business card and reads it into a contact management system like Outlook. Zoominfo scans the Internet and scrapes off information about people and builds profiles about them on its website. You are already on Zoominfo, if you have had any length of time on the planet functioning as an adult.

Zoominfo is indiscriminate. It scrapes anything with your name attached to it: SEC filings, company bios, keynote addresses, church bulletins, little league team rosters, the green couch you sold on Craigslist…anything and everything. You could find a motley collection of the flotsam and jetsam of your life or nothing much of anything.

One professional found that her boss had usurped her profile, or Zoominfo had miss-attributed all her achievements. Further, your profile, much like a mangled credit report on Experian, could have information about multiple people with the same name. 

Zoominfo is the malapropos vitae with unintended consequences. But you can rectify that by skillful editing, and inserting your own branded content.

 

Blogs: Typepad, Blogger, WordPress

Blog platforms are ideal to create, not just a blog, but a vitae that is even more personalized, interesting and even intimate.  Unlike, Visualcv and the social networks that provide the look and feel, you create the color scheme, the look and the layout on a blog.  This is your opportunity to truly express your personality, style, and branded image completely. There is no conforming to the requirements of any service provider.  No boxes to fill in or an online genie to tell you that your profile is only 50% complete.

You can stretch beyond the social networking profiles, the multimodal resume sites and fully present a professional portfolio of yourself using a blog platform.  Now that’s awesome and really scary. It implies that you are clear on your brand, your target market and value proposition and are able to articulate in color, sound, video, design, word, and layout who you are.  If you need help doing this, get help. But the more hands-on you are with the process, the more authentic will be the outcome.

Typepad in fact gives its subscribers a tutorial on how to turn a blog into a resume page. Wordpress, an open source application, is so versatile that many people are using it to build entire websites. The advantages of these platforms are their low cost to build and maintain, their high Google ranking, and the facility of updating the site content without learning HTML.

Of course blogs are used for writing posts that build your participation in the community of your peers, and business sector.  Each blog post is an active, dynamic form of vitae building. Every entry serves to better demonstrate, and draw attention to your credentials, knowledge and expertise than the passive data on a resume.  It is one thing to say that you are highly strategic and analytical on your resume even with a past example, but to actually demonstrate those skills in the blog that you write is by far the better route.

 

The Resume is Not Dead it is Simply Transfigured

This trend to multimodal, multimedia, multiplatform online elaboration and expansion of your professional self will only continue to grow while ensuring the death knell of the resume. As search firms, recruiters, and employers use ever more thorough, and granular searches online to uncover the top candidates and stars they seek, they will look well beyond a simple bland resume format.  Technologists will continue to develop more innovative tools and amazing technologies, and you know the saying, “If they build it, we will find a way to apply it.” 

Finally, your competition will adopt and implement all these tools and techniques and you will have no choice but to keep up. But why not be ahead of the curve?  Consider Malcolm Gladwell’s premise in the Tipping Point, that once a critical mass is reached, a direction becomes inevitable.  So it will go with the resume now.