LinkedIn Features

I’m impressed – slew of LinkedIn changes – and great ones at that – managing your “LinkedIn life” just got massively easier. Great job here. Some of the major upgrades are :

The web profiles have gotten more detailed and well laid-out – although it would be better if you turned of the “Full View” because a full profile makes the viewer scroll down 8 clicks on my 1024 x 768 screen, which is an awful lot. This is what my full profile looks like :

At the bottom of your profile page, there are these links “>>” and “< <" - see screenshot below:

You can click on these links to browse more profiles – although I am not sure whether these profiles come up in a random fashion or whether there is some sequence behind it – I would prefer a randomness though – you never know who you’ll find [ and with a membership of 7 million, that’s a whole lot of random folks you might come up with! ]

Managing recommendations has gotten easier too

You can change your endorsements/recommendations whenever you want so that they are more relevant to the person’s current profile [ or your relationship with them ].

Recommendation updates – If you recommend a service provider to someone, you can choose to send the recommendation to ALL your contacts on LinkedIn – this is absolutely fantastic as LinkedIn is helping its members use the age-old and most-effective marketing tool “Word-Of-Mouth”! But I wouldn’t want to send an e-mail to ALL my contacts – only relevant ones – like people in the same location maybe. [ You can see the above graphic for reference on how to recommend someone – service provider / colleague or business partner – a fairly simple procedure but immensely helpful for the person recommending and the person recommended! ]

LinkedIn is also adding “some light tagging” and they will make the feature more extensive if people use it. [ Sounds fantastic to me – but their search function is already wonderful and powerful so I’m not sure how it will help the business side of things – unless I use tags for a very specific purpose – for example if I’d like to keep track of who all I’ve met personally and who all I’ve never even interacted once even via e-mail and I might want to drop them from my contacts – will have to try to see how the tagging works though. ]. But I was not able to find out how to do this – maybe LinkedIn has released this feature only to some random users or it could be only for the new contacts one makes – that I will find out only when someone sends me a connection request next!

And if you’re already not on LinkedIn, you should definitely sign on. It’s a great way to get that next job or client.