We’re also getting busier and busier and the chance of getting a written recommendation is getting harder.

Now you have a choice, go the ‘old-fashioned route’(!) and get a written recommendation OR you can now be ‘endorsed’ for individual skills or expertise – one click, with suggestions made when you stumble across a connection’s profile. On your profile it now looks like a scorecard against the skills or expertise you claim you have.

The ‘Skills & Expertise’ section, with the new ‘scorecard’ one-click endorsements

So that ‘skills & expertise’ section that was added to your profile about a year ago (and many people still don’t use within their profile) has become very important.

Is the new Endorsements feature any good?

Well, yes and no.

Yes in that it does highlight in a quick, more visual way that people rate your skills (and thereby your services/products).

No in that you may end up being rated for skills you don’t want so high on your profile (anyone can add a skill to your list to endorse it – you will get to approve new ones) or your skills get skewed – let me give you an example:

I manage at any one time a small number of long-term strategic clients (say 8) – large businesses. I also deliver hands on social media training to a large number of (normally) small businesses in a workshop format. I would prefer ‘social media strategy’ to be my ‘top’ rated skill but it’s actually ‘small business’ that comes out on top purely because I delivering training to a large volume of small business clients. It’s not that bad and I’m not complaining about any endorsements I’ve received, they are all warmly welcomed!

No in that when someone comes to my profile, they will see a few of my skills plucked from my list at the top of the screen with the encouragement to endorse me (but it picks the most popular already endorsed ones from what I’ve seen so far thereby exacerbating the ‘small business’ issue highlighted above).

People will either ignore it entirely, endorse a few of those pre-selected ones or if time add their own, which means my total ‘skill set’ may become unmanageable and worthless if I accept all the new ones people suggest – I’ve had to cut my skills list down twice already and ‘lose’ endorsements to keep it manageable (a good problem to have, I know!).

And finally, No in that you thought it was hard to get written recommendations out of clients before? Now it just got a whole lot harder….

My advice:

1. Go and review your ‘skills & expertise’ section, pronto – I’ve seen some very strange ‘skills’ popping up already from some of my connections. You need skills that sound relevant and right added onto the sentence ‘Is [Joe Bloggs] good at xxx?’. Relevance and context is KEY here – we all have plenty of skills but which ones are relevant to your role now – what do you want to be known for most?

2. If you’ve already collated some endorsements, consider losing any skills that have no endorsements (unless they are a core fundamental skill), otherwise it can start to look like you don’t have those skills (the reality being LinkedIn just hasn’t suggested them to anyone yet). Your connections can still add them in when they want to endorse you. Aim to have 10 to 15 ‘skills’ max (we can’t be a master at everything).

3. Review what endorsements you have received – does your connections perceptions of your skills match what you thought people knew about you? If not, maybe there’s a little PR working there to be done….

4. Get endorsing - selectively. PLEASE don’t go and endorse all your mates and or people you know through networking (I already fear endorsements will become a ‘who has the most mates’ feature). Make your endorsements count – who do you work with/for, who are your suppliers, who have you heard speak or done work with in some way. If you endorse and people can see you are endorsing, you’ll have far more chance of getting endorsements for yourself.

5. Ask your clients/co-workers for endorsements – these are the people who matter, so why not send then a quick email, explain you’d like to get some endorsements on your page, provide them the link to your profile and ask them to click away if they have 30 seconds (it really is that quick). While you’re at it you could give them choice of endorsing you or providing a written recommendation – think about what is more useful.

What do you think of this new endorsements feature?

Jan

p.s. If you like this post, why not share it?

p.p.s. If you’d like a copy of future blog posts delivered to your inbox, just fill out the sign-up box below and I’ll do the rest!

Image courtesy of http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jamie-Oliver-Youre-Great-Mug/dp/B002DUCJCW

The post LinkedIn Endorsements: have you checked your skills? appeared first on The Net Advantage.

Answer these questions:

• Do you want more customers?
• Do you have a list of your target customers (either name, company name, position)?
• Are you on Linkedin and have a good number of connections (say 250+)?

If you answered ‘yes’ to these questions…read on (and if you didn’t, you should keep reading too)…

LinkedIn often doesn’t get business owners too excited under the collar as a lead generation tool, the likes of Facebook and Twitter often get more press as the place to be. Not so: in recent research* it was shown that LinkedIn is 277% more effective as a lead generation tool than both Facebook and Twitter.

There are many reasons for that, including effective contribution to LinkedIn groups & use of ‘Answers’ but for me, the killer feature of LinkedIn is the ‘How you’re connected to’ feature. You don’t know who knows who, until you can see who knows who and LinkedIn does that brilliantly.

Let’s say your target client is Sir Richard Branson, your options are call his PA, hope she gives you the time of day and then says Richard is unavailable til 2018 OR you go to LinkedIn, type his name in the search bar and see if you’re connected to him via your connections. Next to his name, if you’re lucky, will be a number, either a ‘2nd’ or a ‘3rd’. If it’s a 2nd, result!

Click on their name to look at their profile, scoot down the right hand side of the page and LinkedIn shows you how you’re connected to them. In an ideal world you know that connection well enough to pick up the phone (or use the ‘Get introduced through a connection’ feature) and ask them how well they know Sir Richard and would they mind providing an introduction or give you some insider knowledge to turn a cold lead into a warm lead.

The above process can save you a huge amount of time trying to turn cold targets into warm leads. I continue to gain clients through it and every client who I’ve done this process with has got at least one client from it.

Even if you don’t have a name but have the business name or a position of the usual decision-maker for your product/service (e.g. operations director), the LinkedIn search still works really well, just use the filters down the left hand side once you’ve done the search to narrow it down by geography, position, 2nd level connections only – the options are really good.

And if your target is a 3rd level connection? You can still access them; you just have 2 levels of connections to get through but it can still save you huge amounts of time.

My advice – before you do the searches makes sure you’ve connected with as many people as you can (that you know well enough to pick up the phone to) to increase your reach.

Have you tried out this feature yet within LinkedIn? If not, why not?

If you like what you read, why not share it?

Jan

*Data from Hubspot, January 2012

Image from wittwertrainingsystems.com

The post How to: get a guaranteed win from LinkedIn appeared first on The Net Advantage.