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LinkedIn For Co-eds

By Marty on June 20, 2011 in Business, LinkedIn, social media

Hi there college students. Welcome home for summer break. Hope your semesters/quarters/trimesters were fruitful and that you learned a lot. So what are you doing with yourselves until next fall? Hanging out? Traveling? Looking for work?

Now is the perfect time to create your professional online persona on LinkedIn. More than just an online resume it is the first place recruiters go to search for talent. Human resource departments are using paper resumes less and less every day. You can keep it updated for those that still request a traditional resume but definitely transfer it to this online portal. This is important because there’s always a chance that an employer will find you online first during a time when they’re not visiting your campus for interviews. So who knows? Its possible that you could even bypass your campus’ career development department for an opportunity.

In addition, your LinkedIn profile gives an overall impression of you as a person, which is really what an employer is hiring. It’s not just your unique talents or the newest academic theories that you can contribute to a company but also your extended knowledge of the world. Remember everything you have ever heard about being a “well rounded person”? This is easily reflected in your activities, organizations, personal interests and the books you read. Can’t fit all of that on a resume but LinkedIn is customized to do that and much more. Not to mention the value of the recommendations that employers, professors and others can leave on your profile.

And speaking of your campus career center more of them are recommending, maybe even requiring you to create a LinkedIn profile. They are the people who deal with human resources professionals around the country and around the world so take their advice and begin editing yours. The summer is the perfect time to do so. This way when you return to campus for the fall term you can schedule a traditional resume and LinkedIn profile review with the career specialists.

So take a couple of weeks early on this summer to work on your profile. Here’s an approach I would suggest.

Take a few hours each day the first week to begin piecing the basics together. Keep your traditional resume open on your computer and work back and forth between each of them filling in updated information on both.
Then the second week focus on connecting with as many other LinkedIn profiles as possible. You could grow your connections by the hundreds if you really push it. Connect with me. I’d be happy to share my list with you and give you tips.
Also during the second week join the maximum of fifty (5o) groups related to your future profession and personal interests. This will expose you to thousands more professionals and you can interact with them directly within those groups and make more connections, etc., etc., etc.

Remember to send me an invitation to connect and reference this blog post. I’d be happy to help in any way that I can.

Whether you have a summer gig or not, take advantage of your time by focusing creating and revising your professional online presence. You’ll reap enormous personal and professional benefits for the effort.

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Behind the Scenes of My Interview With Keisha Jordan

By Marty on June 2, 2011 in After Effects, LinkedIn, Premier Pro, social media, YouTube

Our final project assignment for my DC489 “The Big Picture” class was to interview a person in the field of entertainment. I organized my project by prospecting my LinkedIn connections list for potential interview candidates. I specifically researched some of the artists that I have reached out to via social media and found a couple of candidates with interesting profiles whose careers I wanted to know more about. Senior Art director Keisha Jordan of Common Ground Marketing was one of those who responded.

A couple of things stood out about Keisha. First, her artsy profile picture caught my attention. Instead of a head shot she uses a hand sketch of her face as her profile picture on LinkedIn. That instantly made her stand out from pretty much everyone else on my list (See why you should never leave your profile picture space blank?). It was proof enough to me that she was a serious artist so she was an immediate candidate. The other factor was that we could talk shop about the digital tools we use for our different artistic pursuits. Here’s the interview. Take a look and I’ll continue on the other side.

I mention the effectiveness of a good profile picture for a particular reason. In the case of scheduling Keisha for filming we agreed to meet at the Harold Washington Library. If you’ll take a close look at her sketch, it looks just like the lady in video. I knew exactly who she was as she stepped off the escalator and we headed to our meeting room. If you have any artistic leanings I recommend you use her idea as inspiration if you want to try something a little different for your profile.

As far as project logistics flowed, we rearranged chairs in the meeting room to stage her against one of the walls. I asked more questions than included in the final cut because I had a fifteen minute time limit for the class presentation so you’re hearing about 1/3 to 1/2 of them here. I used my SONY Handycam for filming and had Keisha reposition her chair so I could include a couple of different perspective views of her in the final cut of the film.

For post production I imported three clips of film into Adobe Premier Pro. I typically use After Effects just because I’m used to it but it’s not really a complete film editing program. It’s specifically designed for effects and animation and happens to have some good basic film making features. Premier Pro though is Adobe’s full fledged editing package (all the cutting, audio, color correction and other features of Final Cut Pro for you Mac people) so I made the choice to jump in and use it full tilt for the first time.

After filming, Keisha provide me a few PDF’s of some of her digital ad work and some personal paintings which I faded into the film at different points to demonstrate her skills. The white walls of the meeting room made for a lot of glare in the film so I was able to use color correction to ramp it down. In my first rough cut of the film I created a QuickTime and imported it into After Effects to create opening and closing credits on either end of it (again, because I was used to doing that in After Effects). Fortunately I got bumped to another class day on the presentation rotation and my copy of Adobe Premier Pro CS4, Classroom In a Book arrived in the mail so I learned how to use the title feature within the package to create the credits. So this is my first fully contained Premier Pro production.

I enjoyed this project because I was able to expand my technical skill which as always the objective but also I had the opportunity to network with another professional in the field which was our professor Dan Pal‘s objective. So what do you think of one of Chicago’s art directors on the rise?

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Insights from My LinkedIn Event at the Wright Institute

By Marty on May 9, 2011 in Blogging, Business, Entrepreneurs and Work From Home, facebook, General Interest, LinkedIn, social media

If you ever get the opportunity to attend anything sponsored by the Wright Leadership Institute don’t ask questions just go and take plenty of cards with you. I went to the Connect to Success with LinkedIn Networks and Training Event at their headquarters in downtown Chicago on Thursday May 5th and received a wealth of information.

The evening began with about a half hour of networking before the presentations. Mine actually started in the elevator bay on the way up to the event. I met a good handful of interesting people in that time and in fact that was one of the questions we were asked when the formal meeting began. How many of you met a few new people in the back of the room before the presentations started? That was the key to building our network “hubness”.

Dean DeLisle is well known in the social media realm especially on LinkedIn and he gave the first presentation. He is also the social media coach for the Wright Institute. Dean gave great pointers on how to maximize our LinkedIn profiles. His keys points for me were:

When prioritizing which social media platforms to use LinkedIn should be your first focus. Here’s why. It’s the one that most fully rounded profile of you as a person and professional. From there you can cut and paste details to Facebook, Twitter and any others you belong to. That makes your social media presence consistent throughout.

Also search your name online to verify the thoroughness of your profiles. Your social media profiles are always the first to appear on search lists.

Use LinkedIn for the 2nd and 3rd degrees of separation. It’s not just 6 degrees of separation as in the popular literature but only 3 the LinkedIn way. Any updates to your profile (information edits, blog post feeds, updates you type in under your profile picture, connections) go to the feeds of your 1st, 2nd and 3rd level connections

On average 4% of your network (Those 1st, 2nd and 3rds mentioned above) sees what you post so the more connections you make the more people will see and will potentially want to connect with you.

Here’s an example of LinkedIn hubness showing the primary connections and 2nd and 3rd degree connections that extend from them. Still don’t think it’s important to have a LinkedIn profile? Fill in the gaps in yours and grow your indirect connections (4% of 13 million is 1,690,000) by millions.

Dr. Bob Wright , cofounder of the Wright Leadership Institute gave the second half of the presentation. Cranes Chicago calls him a top executive coach so these tips come from a guy who knows what he’s doing.
Some of Bob’s major pointers for me were:

One of the New Laws of Networks is that You Must Give to Get. In other words you must be a net giver. Give more than you want. It’s known as the “host strategy”.

One of the keys to ultimate success is knowing Network Science. You want to go from being a Node (individual) to a Hub (a major connection source). LinkedIn can help improve your “hubness”.

Here’s a question to ask your clients. “What are your five major challenges?” If you want to know how to help them just ask.

There were lots of other good pointers but you’re going to have to check out their upcoming free events and determine what value you can apply from the experience.

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You’re On Facebook So Now What?

By Marty on September 6, 2010 in facebook, General Interest, SEO, social media

I just read a great book called I’m On Facebook, Now What??? with a lot of good information you can apply immediately. It covers all points from profile optimization to leveraging the Facebook platform for business. Here are a few points that stood out to me.

The book explains that the demographic for Facebook is mostly GenY. This is where the under 35 crowd hangs out.

It also talks about organizing friends into Friends Lists on your own profile as well as joining groups of interest to you. If you have a subgroup of friends that you want to consistently send particular types of info to then you can choose the list name without needing to select a bunch of individuals each time.

One of the nice features are advertising apps written by creative programmers. You can also use Facebook’s add creation button. Business apps are populating Facebook’s space daily. It’s worth your while to spend time investigating some of them to aid business generation.

I learned a completely new term, Social Network Optimization. Including specific search terms (a Search Engine Optimization technique) in the application you create can push it higher on search engine results pages when Facebook users are looking for something new to add to their profiles.

Great chapter on privacy including pros and cons of various settings. I’ll leave it to you to read but suffice it to say you can restrict your friends access to specific pieces of information on your profile, your feeds etc. Everyone doesn’t have to know everything. You can also restrict their ability to comment. These features are particularly helpful if you have colorful friends you want to keep up with but don’t necessarily want to have all your other FB friends scratching their heads about who you hang out with online (smile).

Great book. Check it out from your library or buy it soon.

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