Use LinkedIn Recommendations to Build Credibility

Recommendations are some of the most powerful factors that influence a buyer or employer’s decision to do business with an individual or business entity. LinkedIn realizes this, and has created the LinkedIn Recommendations section to highlight a user’s existing connections that can vouch for his or her professional capabilities.

The people you have already worked with in the past can become valuable references to your professional skill and talents. LinkedIn Recommendations allows these references of yours to personally voice their experiences with you on your profile. This makes it a much easier for your potential clients or employers to verify your capabilities, since the contact details of your recommenders, as well as their feedback about you, are available on LinkedIn.

So how exactly does LinkedIn Recommendations work?

1) On the right side of profile you’ll see a link called “Manage my recommendations.” Click the tab “Request Recommendations.”

2) From the dropdown menu you must select the company where you worked with or for the person who is recommending you. If you were hired as a freelancer or as a consultant, you can select your own company

3) Select who will write the feedback for you. It doesn’t have to be one of your supervisors. LinkedIn Recommendations considers feedback from all directions of the corporate ladder. Consider getting some feedback from your peers on the job, as well as any other subordinates you have worked with in the past.

4) Send a personal note to your reference. Do not use the default text for requesting a reference. Adding a personal touch, such as reminding the person of your work together, is more likely to elicit a good recommendation.

Keep keywords in mind when formulating a personal note to your reference. If, for example, you’re a copywriter, you might request a recommendation about your copywriting skills in order to ensure your chosen keywords will pop up a few times in the recommendation.

Focus on quality, not quantity. LinkedIn requires a minimum of 3 recommendations for your profile to be picked up by the search engines, so have at least 3.

The recommendations of colleagues and business partners will carry more weight than what you say about yourself on your profile. So track down the best recommendations you can gather.  If you are not happy with what someone wrote for a recommendation, you can ask for  changes. If you are still not happy with it, you have the option of deleting it from your profile.

 

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Museum Uses Blogging and Social Media to Increase Audience Engagement

Looking for ways to form a deeper connection with its target audience, the Brooklyn Museum in New York (http://www.brooklynmuseum.org), started a blog so visitors could have a dialogue with curators and share opinions. Now to further the connection, the Museum is enabling visitors to its website to tag (apply keywords) to objects in its collections that appear on its website.

Now you might say, doesn’t the museum staff tag its own collections?
In fact it does.

But the point is that curators and museum visitors see art in  different ways.
According to  Shelly Bernstein, the museum’s manager of information systems:

The way curators and museum professionals see an object isn’t necessarily the same as the way a student or the general public would think to describe it.

When visitors click on the object, they are encouraged to apply any keywords that come to mind (vulgarity not included).The museum then adds the tags to its online database.

The museum also uses tagging to encourage visitors to register online. Registrants can participate in a game of  tag to see how many tags they can come up with, object by object.

I applaud the museum for using an effective, easy way to employ social media tools to increase engagement with its target audience.

If you’re looking for effective ways to use social media (or other marketing tools) to deepen the interaction between your target audience and your products or services, click consulting services.

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Digg vs Stumbleupon

One of the decisions in spreading the word through social bookmarking is which sites to use. They each have their own strengths. I’ll tell you some preliminary results that I had about two of the big bookmarking sites..

From an article posted on my blog, I quickly received about 100 visitors, evenly divided between Digg and StumbleUpon as the source of the visitors. The real eyeopening statistic was time spent on the page. StumbleUpon visitors: 10 seconds, Digg visitors: 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Now that is a huge difference. People who spend more time on the page have more time to engage with the site.

What accounts for the difference? My instinct is that people using Stumbleupon have a browser’s mindset. They are willing to take a few seconds to view a page in the course of browsing through websites.

Digg users arrive with a reader’s mentality. So while these results are very preliminary, as of now I’d say if you had to choose between Digg and StumbleUpon to  spread the word, choose Digg.

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