You might think it would not be wise to take action that one of the top five most influential people in a field "doesn't get." I did it anyway.
A few weeks ago Scott Stratten was invited to speak at Ryerson. Scott goes by @unmarketing on Twitter where he has nearly 120,000 followers, he has a best selling book and was recently identified as one of the top five most influential people in social media by Forbes. One comment he made in his talk was that he "didn't get" LinkedIn. It did not have have a simple and clear purpose in his mind whereas tools like Twitter or more recently Pinterest do. As a result, he felt LinkedIn will simply not be as successful and will not attract the rabid following of other tools.
Despite this anti-endorsement by an expert I decided my LinkedIn profile needed some attention (and had thought that for a while which won't surprise Scott). I had decided to put my name forward for staff representative of my institution's board and updating my LinkedIn profile was one way to convey my experience.
After less than an hour of internet searching I found a few suggestions (listed below) on how to improve my LinkedIn profile. Actions that I took which were not obvious to me before reading these tips included: making a powerful headline statement that was more than just my current job title, adding in as many specialties as well as skills and expertise to when others searching for qualified people and cleaning up the url that would direct others to my profile.
The basic LinkedIn stats show a significant increase in people viewing my profile over the past couple of weeks and some people outside of my network have discovered me as well. Furthermore, my profile has appeared in many more searches once the changes were made.
While it is too early to determine the overall effectiveness of these changes the initial feedback is encouraging. Take a look for yourself and let me know what you think.
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