Dress Up Your Profile for a LinkedIn Groups Interview

When one reads articles about professional networking on LinkedIn, LI Groups are almost always a key component.

LinkedIn Groups are loose confederations of people with a topic, industry, company or qualifications in common. Conversation is mostly driven by group members, and from time to time by a highly engaged group leaders. Some LI Groups have very specific criteria - members of trade associations, employment in a certain field, particular academic achievements, work experience at a specific company, but many others have more open criteria and will allow people who are even peripherally associated with the topic to join. Each group is a little different, and each will have a different take on what makes a good member.

I run an industry-related group myself and, as a result, I see all the various ways a person can misunderstand, misrepresent or simply miss a chance to be seen as a valuable group member.

Here are a couple of tips on dressing up your profile so that the group leader adds you without hesitation:


First: Read the Group Description  Do you fit the group? Are you close, but not quite, what the group is looking for? If you really don't fit the group criteria re-think what you hoped to gain from the group. Check to see if the group posts are Public or not. You may be able to read posts, even if you are not a member of the group.  If you come close, then it's time for a relevance upgrade to your profile...


Second: Add Relevant Experience and Projects to your Profile You may be a volunteer at a local event and that is why you are so interested in this topic. Add that experience to your profile! Companies looking at candidates often look for outside relevant experience to round out on the job experience. Make every effort to let a group owner know that you belong in this group because you already have done relevant work.

Third: Write a Short Note to the Group Leader LinkedIn doesn't give Group Leaders a chance to require notes from applicants, but providing context goes a long way to filling in holes. Explaining how your experience or projects are relevant to the group. Don't give the group leader a resume, just highlight the relevance of your experience.


Fourth: Do Not Reply With Anger to a Rejection Because my group is an industry group, I end up rejecting a great number of people who do not really pay attention to the group criteria. Because some number of those people are younger, with little professional experience, I occasionally receive very angry emails explaining why my rejection was unfair. Not surprisingly, this does not work to change my mind...if anything it reinforces my belief that my choice was the correct one. No one needs or wants a professional group member who throws hissy fits. As the Group Owner one of my jobs is to keep the group from too much drama, in fact.


In my group, I am as flexible as possible when I allow folks in. If there is no note added, I will visit a profile and look for relevant experience. So frequently I encounter profiles that are incomplete or utterly bare, with no way to know why this person thinks they are a good match for the group. I also see a great deal of wishful thinking, as young people apply to the group in order, they hope, to get a job. Unfortunately, my group description specifically states that the group is not to be used for job-hunting. If they took a moment to read the description, they'd know that.

Seeing how you fit into the group will go a long way to saving time and energy (and avoiding potential rejection.) Dress up your profile and be professional to pass your LinkedIn Group interview.

How Social Media Doesn't Work (and How It Does)

It's morning. We wake up and turn on the, Internet, TV or radio for weather report, music, traffic or companionship. A voice starts talking to us while we pour our coffee.

A commercial comes on, "Log in to our Facebook page at...!" the voice says. We stop and stare at the TV. "Log in to our Facebook page?" we say, dumbfounded at the idea. "You sell sneakers. What benefit can your Facebook Page give me?"

So we check. Nope, no sales, no discounts, just facts about the store and a overenthusiastic comment or two - then a lot of questions on the Wall that have been left unanswered.

How Social Media doesn't work: If your business has a Facebook page, you'd better have something there to make it worth people's time and respond to them when they ask questions.

We're on the way to the office, radio in the car is on. The DJ, who clearly has been given a free meal at a local restaurant in return for a positive comment is raving about the awesome large portions. "Don't forget the pickles" he says, eagerly echoed by his sidekick. "The pickles?" we echo. How stupid do they think we are? It's obvious that they've been fed for free or paid to endorse this restaurant. And, we ask ourselves, is this DJ really someone we admire? Do we *care* what kind of food he likes? Probably not.

How Social Media doesn't work: Paid endorsements are not, and never will be, Social Media.

We start our morning email review and there, on Facebook, is a picture on a friend's feed. It's a book we have never heard of - the cover is appealing. The friend is someone whose taste we trust. So we take a few minutes and look around for information about that book. And we find a video trailer that delights and charms. We share the trailer with our Facebook group, our Twitter and we buy the book.

That's how Social Media works.

Guest Post on Brainzooming: Fake Social Media Hall of Fame

This week on Twitter I was calling out egregious corporate misuses of Social Media. At the behest of Mike Brown of Brainzooming, I collected them all into a guest post for his blog. I invite you to enjoy my Fake Social Media Hall of Fame and other great posts on innovation and creativity at Brainzooming!

When You've Crossed the Line Between Fan and Friend

Social Media has provided all of us with almost unlimited access to communicate across previously unbreachable distances. Geographic distances mean nothing, and Time is not nearly the issue it used to be. Even the distance between fans and their idols are decreasing. Your favorite actor may not follow you back on Twitter, but you know...they may. Or they might respond when you have something important to say to them. People in niche fields have unprecendented access to people they admire, where they are likely to get personal reponses from creative minds that even a few years ago would be walled away behind a publicity machine.

As fantastic as it is, this access is not without problems.

This week I posted a rage comic on my personal Facebook account. A "friend" took offense to it and 'splained why I had no right to post it. When I suggested that people who 'splained was, in fact the problem, they 'splained again why I was a jerk.

The problem here is that this person was not, actually, a friend of mine. This was a fan who has access to me as a "friend." The fact that they took offense and used the opportunity to 'splain to me how rude it was was ironic, since the comic was specifically about how fans tend to 'splain.

To be clear here, I should probably explain what 'splaining is. 'Splaining is short for mansplaining, or whitesplaining or, in this case, fansplaining, in which a person presumes to know more about a thing than the people they are talking to, based on the fact that they are a member of a privileged group or because they simply don't know or care how much the other person knows. When a woman asks a group about what SSD to get, and a guy in the room starts to talk to her about memory and security like she doesn't already understand that, that's "mansplaining."  Fans of popular culture have a habit of wanting to win a conversation, or show how much they know, so they "fansplain."

The real problem is not that this fan chose to 'splain something I already knew to me, it was that he chose to lecture me on my personal FB account. He crossed the line.

I've seen people get very angry when an admired idol doesn't respond to their tweets. Or be furious when their emails are blocked. Not everyone wants to be friends with their fans. Even people who are relatively relaxed about that have a line in the sand they don't want crossed. My line is this - don't presume to tell me what I should or should not say on my own spaces. For one thing, you don't know what my intent is. Secondly, and I mean this in the nicest possible way - you are not actually my friend. So, please, don't cross that line.

Because you can contact someone on Social Media, do not presume that your are actual friends.


Be mindful of your privilege as a fan, and enjoy, but do not overstep those boundaries.

Sharing Content vs Sharing Activity

If you've been anywhere near a social platform, you've seen messages like this: "Friend A likes this update" or "Friend B" has read this article" (and, clicking on the article title seems to always require you to hand all your information to the publisher before you can see the content.)

Facebook, in particular is very keen on you seeing your friends' activity. LinkedIn, too, wants you to know that a connection has followed a company, connected with someone else, answered a question, joined a group.

The problem with that is exactly the same problem as talking to a friend who walks you through every step of their day, without degree or distinction; waking up, brushing teeth, eating breakfast, commute, meetings at work, home, etc... no one wants every single detail of your day. What we'd like to hear is the juicy bits, the good stuff. ^_^

Each social platform is a different conversation. Even when you have the same people talking about the same thing in the same place, there's subtle differences in audience, tone, attention, and acceptable length. Posting Twitter conversations on LI is meaningless to anyone not already in that conversation.

Be mindful of the difference between "activity" and "content." 


Facebook wants us to know all our friends' activities. What they read, what they commented on, what games they played, etc.

If your Twitter feed is automatically sent to LinkedIn, all your contacts are getting all of your activity, your RTs, your @s, your replies. The only thing that will be meaningful to many of those people in all of that is any content you share. And how patient do you think your contacts will be when they have to wade through 3 dozen chatty posts to get to a brilliant piece of content?

Quora, a platform I adore, yesterday launched a new feature that shared your Quora activity on your Facebook Timeline. I enabled it and ten minutes later, disabled it. I have no doubt my friends on FB would be interested in some of the answers I post to questions there, but equally, I have no doubt at all that no one not already on Quora cares which other answers I upvote. While the content I generate there may be of interest, my activity on Quora is entirely irrelevant to the folks on FB.

Small and medium sized businesses on Twitter, and individuals whose expertise is their business, often have only one Twitter account. To be authentic and real, these people tend to chat as well as share good content from this same account. This works really well on Twitter, where each tweet is viewed individually but, when it becomes a stream of half the conversation on a Twitter feed embedded on a web page, it simply makes no sense at all. Like sitting next to a person on the train who talks loudly enough that you can't not listen, you're getting an intrusive half a conversation you don't really want to hear.

Worse, when companies keep their Twitter account for purely professional contacts, that embedded stream becomes an obsessively narcissistic stream of "me me me." Again - it works fine on Twitter, but watch where else it gets shared or you can seem like you are incapable of listening to others.

So, by all means, share content! Just be mindful that your not drowning it out with all of your activity.

The Importance of Not Ignoring the Problem

As happens quite frequently on today's Internets, someone I admire was sharing a bad customer service story. And, like anyone who exists today, I also have had bad customer service stories.

Ken Mueller wrote a post about a bad experience he had at his local post office, and on Twitter, I mentioned that I had had similar experiences at mine. As I did, I started to think about that particular problem and realized - every single time I had that issue, it was the same exact person who caused it.

I'll bring an envelope or package to any of the other employees, they send it. Person A demands full customs forms for just about every kind of thing one can send, right down to a birthday card. The discrepancy isn't the real pain point though - its the incredulity with which this story is met by any side. I tell her, "Well J let me send this same thing without customs," and she rolls her eyes and shrugs, refusing to send it. I tell that story to J and T at the counter and they shrug and say that they have never heard of such a thing. These three people have been working together for 10 years and this has happened multiple times...how is it that no one had ever encountered that problem but me?

Obviously, that is not the case. What is true is that everyone is ignoring the problem.

J lets things through, because he's the "nice guy" of the staff. T follows the rules by the book, but if the book lets you avoid the customs then you do, but she gets all bent out of shape when you make her add a surcharge for sending something weirdly shaped. A demand all forms be filled out before you get to her window, and you will fill out ALL forms that might, potentially be needed, because probably once she was reprimanded for not doing that.

Here's the problem - there's no consistency between the way they handle things...and no acknowledgement that the others handle things differently.

So you go in and hand the letter with customs form already filled out to J and he scoffs at the form, tells you don't need it, what are you thinking? You hand it to T and she hands it back, but bitches "what's IN here?" and hand it to A and she rolls her eyes at the fact that the zip code is not legible enough. You have to do it over again.

Thinking about your customer service - are you ignoring the problem? Are you or your employees ignoring the actual issue? Is it divide and conquer - "no one else has reported that problem, so it must be you"? Is each person picking up the phone giving a different story, a different process, a different set of requirements?

Imagine if you're your client or customer - you'd want a consistent set of rules and a consistent set of outcomes. Ignore the problem and you're sure to give the consumer the customer service from hell.

Get Bigger (Better) Impact from Your Facebook Status Updates

Facebook is easy. Too easy. It takes very little effort to craft a status that gets Likes from friends, family or folks who want you to think kindly of them. But for your Business Page, just any old status update isn't likely to get the response you're really looking for. Here are a few simple tactics you can use to increase the impact of your Facebook status updates.

Know What Action You Want People To Do - Then Tell Them To Do It

I was speaking to someone recently who expressed a concern that people were not "Like"ing or commenting on their status updates. There was nothing at all wrong with their posts, but nowhere did they indicate the desired action. It wasn't surprising then that people didn't know what they were supposed to do.

"Like" now to express interest in this new design

"Leave a comment" to let us know if you want this flavor

"Share" this article with your network

Each of these seems a bit demanding, but remember, on Facebook, people are being bombarded constantly by multiple media, and a steady stream of requests, news, opinions and miscellany. Make your desired action simple and state it plainly to help your readers know what you expect.


Draw Attention to the Media

Not everyone likes words as much as I do. Many people prefer visual or audio cues, Facebook makes it extremely simple to share many kinds of media. So how do you get yours noticed?

When you post an update with an attached picture, sound clip or video, you want people to look (or listen) to it. Small things, like gobbledygook URLS or generic commentary about the host site will make readers' eyes glaze over with confusion.

But don't worry, Facebook now lets you edit metadata for all media. Let's say I want to upload a simple picture to my personal FB page. I could grab it from my Flickr account.

Notice the URL and the title. They aren't terribly meaningful to anyone. And Facebook isn't picking up the image as a thumbnail.

To edit information like the image title, or the metadata, scroll your mouse over the words you want to edit:

The editable data will turn yellow to indicate that you can edit it. Click those words and a text box will appear:

Then edit the title. You can do the same with the description. Instead of generic metadata from Flickr, you can customize the content for that update.

However, we're still left with the issue of  the missing thumbnail and the gobbledygook URL.

Uploading links to photosharing sites on the fly is fine, but to ensure your post has a thumbnail, upload the picture directly to a Facebook Photo Album.

Write a meaningful status update, indicating what you'd like people to do, and what they are looking at.

With customized information and a clear status update, the end result is worth it. (Keep in mind that this is a personal page, with appreciably less viewers than a business page.)

Don't Confuse the Issue

Now that you have a chance to make greater impact, don't get too enthusiastic. If you ask your followers to do too much at once, your message will get muddled.

Above, I asked people to "look" at the picture and "Like" it. If I then added, "and can I get your opinion on the shade of purple? Do you think it's too dark? Or should I go with a lighter color?" some people will comment, some will "like" and others will get tired before they get to the end of the status.


Don't Forget the Basics

Of course, with this, you still need to engage and respond to comments when you receive them. Don't forget to reward them with  - at the very least - thanks and acknowledgement for their contributions to your page, their questions and comments. These power of Facebook is that you get to see names of your customers so there's less chance of them becoming faceless numbers. They are not "The Consumer," they are the people you interact with every day.

Be descriptive and clear, remember to engage and thank and you will be on the road to much higher impact on your FB status updates.