Setting up the Ultimate LinkedIn Profile – Part 2

Have you updated the “blue box” portion of you LinkedIn profile and now you are ready to complete the rest of your profile? Excellent!

Beneath the “blue box” you have Summary and Specialties opportunities. This area offers the greatest opportunity to present yourself and enhance your personal brand. To determine your content, start by thinking about the goal of your LinkedIn profile: Are you job hunting? Are you using in business development for your company? Do you use to recruit? Are you positioning yourself as a thought leader in your field or as a staff member promoting your company? Make a decision about how you wish to be perceived by the viewer to determine the content for this section. Use keywords to search terms that are you would want to be found and determine how people are presenting themselves in their Summary.

Summary
If the goal of your LinkedIn profile is to build your company’s brand, the Summary section offers you that opportunity. If you do include your company’s value proposition, be sure to include your position at your company. You may be the face of your company for the viewer of your profile. Include yourself in your introduction of your company.

If you are job hunting, this is the equivalent of the Professional Overview you may have on your resume. Summarize your experiences and describe your value to a new employer. This is your sales pitch on you.

If you plan to build your personal brand with your LinkedIn profile, summarize your value proposition. To see an example, visit http://www.linkedin.com/in/nealschaffer. Neal literally wrote the book on Maximizing LinkedIn:

Neal’s Summary is written in the third person (a personal choice). Neal’s value proposition as a thought leader in social media, and LinkedIn in particular, is firmly established in his Summary.

Specialties
If you were to search for someone just like you – which keywords would you use? Load this area up with those keywords. A great example from an anonymous recruiter:

If you are job hunting – use the keywords you have added to your resume to ensure that automated software flags your resume in a search. Search colleagues and competitors to see which keywords they use under Specialties.

Experience
If promoting your company in your Summary was counterintuitive to your Summary goals, you have the opportunity to do so under Experience. Tell the viewer of your profile about your company and your role there. If you are unsure of the proper positioning of your companies, past and present, visit their online newsrooms. Press releases close with a boilerplate of information about the company. It provides you the correct positioning of your company. Describe your company at the open of each position and close with your role at the company.

Recommendations
Give them! Get them! I will write more about this in a future blog post. For now – know it is as important to give them as to receive. They call this “social media” for a reason – be social. Look through your Connections and write genuine, unsolicited recommendations for people you have worked with in the past or work with now. Colleagues, vendors, clients – I’m sure you get the idea. You will feel good that you identified someone’s value and told them.

Education
Include all the schools you attended, including high school. If you don’t, you may miss an area in common with someone who views your profile. I may have a prospective client who also attended an all-girls Catholic high school …

Groups and Organizations
Include all of your active memberships in this section of your profile. As with Education, you may have an organization or interest in common with the viewer of your profile.

Honors and Awards
If you have them, you earned them. Use them. Share with your viewer Honors and Awards that validate the value you have presented in your LinkedIn profile.