As said before, your LinkedIn profile is how you make a first impression on others. Whether you know it or not, you are being regularly researched online. For the job seeker then, it’s exceedingly important you make that recruiter pick up the phone and call you.

Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile

Just as it’s important to be descriptive for the person reading your profile to understand who and what you’re about, it’s equally important that search engines understand you, too. Why does Google, Bing, and Yahoo matter? When people research you, they typically don’t go to specific sites to find you. They enter your name and probably your location into a search engine, then start sifting through the results.

Associating your name with relevant keywords is why optimizing your profile for people and machines matters.

For example, let’s say you are an independent accountant. You focus on providing accounting and tax preparation services to small businesses in your city. You have no staff, no marketing budget, and a rudimentary network. How do you promote yourself?

One way to help you get found is to write your profile to include keywords that people searching for you will use.

Make a list of the types of businesses you want to attract. Let’s say you want to focus for now on lawn keepers because it’s summer:

• Lawn maintenance services
• Lawn mowers
• Gardening services
• 98122
• Small business accounting
• Small business tax preparation

This simple example lists search terms that you can incorporate into your profile. The search engines look at relevancy and proximity of terms to one another to determine context. That is, if your profile says the following, then a search engine is likely to score you a high match to the searcher’s query:

David Thompson is a small business accountant with 10+ years experience providing small business accounting and small business tax preparation for lawn maintenance, gardening services, and lawn mower small businesses in the Seattle area.

Make LinkedIn Profiles Work For You

As you write entries about your work experience and history, use specific terms. Avoid generic statements like, “Successfully achieved first quarter results for my division.” Instead, you can say, “Generated 24% rate of return on physical inventories in the first quarter of 2008 using CPERP inventory management system.”

Put Some Flair Into Your LinkedIn Profile

The impulse with LinkedIn profiles is to write dry, conventional resume-like statements. I encourage you to show more color in your profile. Certainly profanity is out of the question for most people but I have seen profiles that use mild instances to good effect. You know what is acceptable in your industry, so use good judgment.

By injecting some color into your profile, you reveal yourself as a well-rounded person – not another resume. And everyone wants to connect with a real person, not a piece of paper.

Honor the Facts

Tempting as it may be to stretch the truth here and there, you can better compensate for any shortcomings by using gentle humor or short-and-sweet sentences to fill in the gaps.

New to the work world and fresh from an internship this summer? Show what you learned but also show how you grew and enjoyed it.

“Advertising Account Specialist freshly minted from Northern University wants to surprise and delight your clients like I learned from Watson Advertising the summer of 2008. I listen to what they want, craft a brief so the creatives get it right, and know to fetch coffee if you need it.”

When In Doubt, Imitate

Look at several profiles in your profession on LinkedIn. When you find one that impresses you, study what makes it work. Pick apart the formula, then swap out the keywords that person used with the ones you need. You are better off imitating than being boring.

Looking for Some Mutual Optimization?

Want to review a statement before going public? We can’t give you lawyerly advice but we are great with a thumbs up or thumbs down and reasons why. Post your optimized profile in the Comments.

Relationships matter. Relationships are about individuals connecting to share information, discover meaning together, and expand their mutual knowledge.

As social media expands its presence among the facets of our lives, the professional realm receives special focus.

Long considered the premier social networking site for business professionals, LinkedIn boasts over 50 million members in 200 countries in 170 industries as of October 2009.

Whether for meeting a new recruiter, business partner, vendor or job candidate, you can expect to be researched on LinkedIn. It is regarded as the web site to research people and companies.

Salespeople use it to mine for leads. Recruiters research job candidates before deciding to move resumes forward. Job seekers use it to uncover who they know at the companies they are targeting — and who those people know by extension.

Think of LinkedIn as an expanded edition of the yellow pages: not only can you find the right person at nearly any company but you can review their history and relationships, too.

Use it to create awareness of you among people you do not know but want to know. You can also use it to demonstrate your company’s strengths and build business relationships.

Who’s Using LinkedIn?

Who are those 50 million users?

• Executives from all Fortune 500 companies
• Entrepreneurs seeking new clients and investors
• Recent college graduates connecting with classmates and instructors
• Sophisticated job seekers
• Independent consultants of all stripes
• Individuals building professional networks for career and business development

What You Get From LinkedIn

Rather than exchanging a business card (buried on your desk never to see daylight again), LinkedIn keeps your connections vibrant and sustains your interactions with them by you maintaining your profile and network regularly. Otherwise, your connections can easily turn into that forgotten business card.

Many companies post job openings exclusively on LinkedIn to attract higher caliber candidates, and to recruit for those golden slots in the hidden job market.

Thousands of Groups, Discussions, and Answers offer a wealth of free expertise to help you solve specific problems. Just ask!

The more active you are by posting Status Updates, building new connections, participating in Groups and Discussions, and providing Answers to questions asked by others, the more value you gain from LinkedIn. With daily or weekly email updates, you are easily kept up to date with the goings on of your network, too.

Making Introductions

A terrific feature of LinkedIn is the ability to introduce your connections to one another. Since we can’t always meet in person, this enables you to connect two people who can benefit by getting to know each other.

Whether it’s a candidate interested in a recruiter’s company, or a friend needing services from a firm you recommend, the ability to introduce and build connections demonstrates the value you offer your connections. This value grows your network into a potent resource others will want to tap.

Degrees of Connection

As you build your network, people you connect with one-on-one are “first-degree” connections. Their connections are “second-degree” and those connections are “third-degree,” relative to you.

You might think a first-degree connection is better than a second- or third-degree connection. It’s counterintuitive but second degree connections often prove more vital.

This is because you cannot know everyone. But the people you know bestow a level of trust in the people they connect with, just as they do with you. This shows that if they trust you, they likely trust the other person also.

By extension, you can probably trust this person, too. Ask for an introduction through your mutual contact if you can offer value to that second-degree connection. Don’t just connect to ratchet your numbers higher. Building a network is not solely a numbers game but your number of connections strongly correlates with your reach.

Growing your network organically allows you to curate your base of contacts. Choose quality over quantity.

LinkedIn Tutorials

For a quick but thorough lesson on getting started, try LinkedIn’s online how-to’s for step-by-step instructions.

http://bit.ly/linkedin101

Looking for a Jump Start?
Unsure of how to create a profile or what certain settings mean? Post your question in the Comments section for a response.

With the economic situation affecting millions of lives globally, we are connecting and reconnecting in new ways. People are attending networking events in droves to learn new skills and meet new people. Groups with mutual interests are self-forming and self-directing collectively without any formal structure – and producing great work.

And with these behaviors comes the impetus to open up, to be transparent, to admit our vulnerabilities, to drop selfish agendas and begin looking beyond ourselves to meet not only our own needs and desires but those of others.

One tool that answers this is social media.

Connecting with others is a social activity. Connecting with others in a meaningful way is networking. And networking with a collaborative view in mind in an online, virtual way (called web 2.0) will surely change the way we work with others. For a history on this kind of social change through social media, see Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom by Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta.

In the past few years, social networking and social media have become prominent topics in the ongoing transformation of life online.

By now, you have surely heard of Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, probably Twitter, and maybe even read a few blogs. But what hidden value does each of them hold for you?

Consider that social media is changing the way we connect, work together, and sustain relationships, and you will quickly see why it matters.

Social media is the technology that knits together, online, what you do in real everyday life: talk to people, bond over commonalities, and form mutually beneficial relationships.

Social media thrives on participation and making connections. It is media in which you can easily participate and add your contribution. It is an arena where your unique perspective has influence and your precise credibility is prized. Whether you’re a high school drop out or an MBA from the Wharton School of Business, your offerings may be a real value to others and a key motivator for you to keep active in various virtual communities.

Once you understand how to use the various tools (the ones most relevant to you), you will find that they extend your reach by many degrees.

Social media is the set of tools, the digital manifestation, the driving the need to share important information in ways that are simple and efficient.

As social networking sites like Facebook have exploded–especially for the babyboomers—we now share with other people in our network more about our lives and the lives of those we know.

It’s been said that, “It isn’t who I know that matters so much as who my friends know” that makes the difference. Those second-degree connections (what Malcolm Gladwell calls loose affiliations) have proven to have the most value in networking and in marketing. Now technology makes it easier to uncover who knows whom. Ready to play private investigator without being called a stalker?

Browse through a friend’s LinkedIn connections. Did you know that David knows Charlie who knows Shawna, the same Shawna you happened to meet recently by chance?

Your circle just tightened by a degree through closing an outlying tangent. The added benefit is that Shawna is friends with the hiring manager of a company where you want to work. This is the magic of networking. Even economists like John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison are realizing the magnetic force of such networking. They call it the Power of Pull.

It’s also the power of social media: it flattens and equalizes the access to information that makes it possible to connect to people and ideas that are important to you.

When you share a New York Times article on Facebook, you share it with every one of your friends there. What conversations are you creating? What questions are you helping to answer? What sparks are you igniting? You may not always know but taking credit isn’t where the value lies. Inspiring another person is where your currency now trades.

With simple tasks you can do each day, this eBook teaches you not only the tools you need to use regularly but also how to use them in an integrated fashion that increases your online presence in ways that get you recognized as a go-to person. By taking ownership of your digital footprint, you begin to build Brand You. Brands (and careers) are not built overnight. Both require hard work. Now is the time to seize the (free!) tools to make you more agile, more connected and a great resource.

Adopt these behaviors today – not only when you are job searching.

I’m a sucker for lists of 10 but there’s good nuggets in this one, plus video segments. Pass it along!

Like most of us job searching, I spend a lot of time online these days. Probably more than is healthy some times. But I also get out, meet people and exchange a lot of information, too.

This is a great example of another resource I want to share with all my fellow seekers. Using resources like these will help you prepare for the next step, because it’s going to be a long and big one.

Yes, waking up to “45,000 new layoffs by Caterpillar, Starbucks and Sprint” this morning was a downer. You can grind over the daily saddening announcements, or focus on positioning yourself for the next opportunity. I take the latter because at the end of the day, I know I’ve been productive even if I didn’t get a paycheck for it. And I’m that much closer to ending the numbing state of job search.