LinkedIn: Building your personal & company brand

So I'm a lukewarm LinkedIn user. I understand it's value (mostly) and have started using it as my online CV for my more recent work. So I was really interested to hear what Jeff Willinger had to say at the Ungeeked conference on improving your personal brand starting with LinkedIn.

First off, the professional headline. This is where people can see what you are good at. It's a place to tell the viewer what you do and not who you work for. They can see that in your employment section that is usually immediately following your headline on your profile.

I have it wrong. The first thing on my headline is where I'm currently working. I have a discussion at my table what I should call myself. It now says Social media & community specialist but I'm not sure if that sounds too protentious? How the heck do I tell people what I do? (side note: I'd love your imput on this as I want a quick way to let people know what I do in the best way possible). Moving on...

The second most important is the summary and specialties. Specialties is actually what is looked at when people search for people to work and connect with. This needs to really say what you do in a words that your potential clients or employers will look for. Mine needs work. Oh LinkedIn profile. How I've failed you. This will take a bit longer to craft.

Jeff then has used applications to add a box on twitter, his reading list, and trip it. Interesting. I actually signed up to tripit ages ago but never thought to connect to my LinkedIn to allow my professional connections to be able to contact me when I'm near them. Added. He also has slideshare on there which is an area that I want to use now that I'm speaking more. This way my contacts can still be able to experience a talk I've done if they can't be there.

On my LinkedIn, I also have events added to show where I'm speaking or what I'm going to so I can meet with other contacts (which I can honestly say I've not used as well as I could) and have my blog posts there as well so I can share what I'm writing about.

Jeff left us with these points about LinkedIn:

• Take time


• Be remarkable


• Be helpful


• Be supportive


• Be resourseful


• Do NOT sell


• Have fun

This was great for me in terms of utilizing LinkedIn as an individual. This is great for me in terms of figuring out how best to use this tool.

I've also been exploring LinkedIn as a company. One of the areas that I have as part of our strategy is showing our expertise not only as a company but as individuals. Linked in is perfect for this. We have a company page that lists all employees and on the front page of our site, I've now added a link to our LinkedIn page as well as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. On our meet the team page? We link to everyone's individual profiles.

This didn't necessarily come easy. "But people can contact us. I'll be spammed." I explained that people outside of our organization want to know who works behind the scenes. In order for our members to gain trust, they need to know that there are experts working for them. Allow access to LinkedIn will help them with this, and to be honest? If anyone wanted to find your LinkedIn, they can. It's called Google.

But an explanation isn't enough. So I created a document that explained how to change your LinkedIn settings to make it more private if they wished (you can see it here). I also knew that a number of our team weren't on twitter. But if they connected our work account in a certain way, I could add #in to the twitter posts that were about our blog and it would be posted in their status. This will help us spread the word about what we are doing to their network and help them show what they are working on.

Last thing I want to leave with you came from Jeff. He says thank you to everyone who joins him on LinkedIn. I like that. So thank you for reading.

PS Any other LinkedIn tips? I'd love to hear them so please leave them below!