Organizing LinkedIn Connections via Tags

LinkedIn is in beta with a new connections page that makes it easier to find, organize and stay in touch with your business contacts. The update adds a panel that makes it much nicer to browse contacts quickly, enabling you to find what you need with a few clicks. You now are able to browse contacts by their companies, industries or locations. Selecting the recent activity filter, you can see who has added new connections.

When you click on one of your connections, a mini profile appears in the right panel, showing you contact information, photo, current position and number of connections.

One feature that caught my attention is the ability to tag your connections. Similar to friend lists on Facebook and lists on Twitter, you now can segment your connections so you can send specific communications depending on which list they are on. It’s no longer an all or nothing selection! This is a feature many have been waiting for with LinkedIn and is a welcome addition. Read more on Organizing LinkedIn Connections via Tags…

Seek Quality not Quantity in Your Social Networks

I have always been about quality. I know a lot of people, but value my few close friends. When it comes to clothes, I would rather have one quality, custom outfit than a dozen that were just ok. And when it comes to social media, I want to build a quality network of people rather than a massive list of names.

The first step in building a community is to develop relationships with people who have similar interests to yours and then engage in conversations, offering something of value and interest to them.

My goal is to build my networks strategically. I don’t add followers, friends or connections just because I can. I add quality people that have some personal or professional connection to me. To many, my networks may appear to be rather small, but they are enormous in their value to me.

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Do You Hide Your LinkedIn Connections?

I’ve noticed that some of my contacts (10% to be exact) have made their connections private on LinkedIn. As a social network, hiding your contact list seems, well, not very social. When a contact list is private, I can’t browse my connection’s network to see who I may know or who may be of interest to me. I can still find people in their network via a keyword search showing them as the first-level contact that provides the connection, but I have to know what I’m looking for and I can’t just open up their connection list and peruse them for familiar faces. Read more on Do You Hide Your LinkedIn Connections?…

My First Week’s Experiences on Twitter

Is it Worth It?

I have to say that using Twitter was not high on my list for a long while, but I finally dove in to see what this social media tool was all about. But since joining the service and selecting a few folks I wanted to follow (right now I’m following only about 20 people who’s blogs I read regularly), I find I’m really seeing a lot of value in this social network from the business perspective.

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How Much is Too Much?

As a service professionals, we are challenged to provide proof of our expertise. We do that through articles, blogs, free consultations and speaking engagements. All of these exercises help us build our personal brand reputation as an expert in our field.

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