How time flies. We’re already halfway through 2011 and 118 of your LinkedIn connections have started something new. Here they are.

Have you started something new in 2011? Let your connections know.

If you are a LinkedIn user with enough number of LinkedIn connections, you should have received notification regarding your connections’ job updates.

It is important to ensure your LinkedIn resume/profile is up-to-date. Other LinkedIn tips include:

• LinkedIn self-branding
• LinkedIn marketing
• LinkedIn SEO

LinkedIn’s official blog offers tips to handle “horrible” bosses:

• Keep an Open Mind: Assume your boss can miss details and being clumsy about interpersonal relations.
• Connect Campaign: Connect with your peers/co-workers across different teams/departments. When working on projects, you should get feedback and support from peers/co-workers.
• Have the Talk: Give honest feedback to your boss at the right time.
• Be Prepared: Move on, if nothing works after you have tried.

• Create LinkedIn Profile URL
• Create Professional LinkedIn Profile
• Build LinkedIn Connections
• Get LinkedIn Recommendations
• Connect LinkedIn Profile to Social Media, Blogs and Websites
• Display PowerPoint Presentations
• Participate in LinkedIn Answers
• SEO your LinkedIn profile

Create LinkedIn Profile URL

Create an easy-to-remember LinkedIn Public Profile URL:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/gordonchoi

The URL is in this format:

www.linkedin.com/in/[your name]

Create Professional LinkedIn Profile

Your work resume is the major content of your LinkedIn profile, which consists of your professional headline, career summary, current detailed job description, past detailed job descriptions, and qualifications/educations.

• Create your Linkedin Professional Headline, e.g. Bilingual Search Engine Marketer.
• Write a “summary” of your work experience and skills.
• Create a detailed job description for your current job/position.
• Add the job descriptions in details to each of your previous jobs.
• Add your qualifications/educations.

Build LinkedIn Connections

Increase your LinkedIn Connections by connecting to:

• All the work colleagues who are already on LinkedIn.
• People who have large number of LinkedIn connections.
• People who are in your industry, who have the same professions to you.

Join LinkedIn Groups that are relevant to your industry/profession and display your Groups on your LinkedIn Profile.

Get LinkedIn Recommendations

Get endorsements/recommendations from people who have worked with you.

Good candidate to endorse you, include:

• People who you have worked closely together on projects.
• People who have worked in your teams.
• People who used to be your ex-boss.
• People who have appreciated your great work.

Recommendations for Gordon
Head of SEM
Alibaba.com

“I supported Alibaba’s PPC spend in key markets and Gordon was my main point of contact. I enjoyed working with him because he was always informed (very smart guy), knew his objectives and how he was performing against them, and was always very pleasant to work with. I hope we can work again together in the future.” August 25, 2009

Jonathan Liu, Head of Global Account Management – APAC, Yahoo!, was a consultant or contractor to Gordon at Alibaba.com

“The greatest impression I have about Gordon is despite his unassuming and mild manner, he is able to lead a team to achieve targets over and beyond the ones set. Each time the targets are reached, he will raise the bar higher and achieve those targets as well. All these are achieved with grace, respect and knowledge. I have never seen Gordon in all my years of working with him lose his cool even under duress.” August 12, 2009

Winnie Khoo, Senior Director, Alibaba.com, managed Gordon at Alibaba.com

“Gordon brings his years of experience and expertise to Alibaba.com in the SEM domain. His professionlism, knowledge and personality are immensely respected by people working with him. He builds the SEM team from almost scratch to a high-performing contributor to Alibaba.com’s global business.” June 3, 2009

Scott Ni, Director, Site Operations, Alibaba.com, worked directly with Gordon at Alibaba.com

“Gordon and I worked together on a development project to support the team that Gordon was managing. Our collaboration was smooth and communication open. I managed the technical aspects while Gordon managed and owned the business requirements. His fast response to change requests and ability to digest technical information made my work a lot easier. He’s also a really friendly person and humorous at times. When needed, his team members also supported my team with enthusiasm, a sign of successful leadership.” June 1, 2009

Sean Yu, Product Manager, Alibaba.com, worked with Gordon at Alibaba.com

Connect LinkedIn Profile to Social Media, Blogs and Websites

You may have a blog that somewhat has topics related to your work, a website (or your company’s website) and profiles on other social networking sites. You may also have been microblogging through Twitter or Google Buzz.

• Add links from your LinkedIn profile to your blogs and websites.
• Link back to your LinkedIn profile from your personal blog.
• Connect your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile.

Once LinkedIn and Twitter are connected, your Tweets and Retweets will become your LinkedIn status updates.

Display PowerPoint Presentations

Show your PowerPoint presentations and trainings in your LinkedIn Profile. For example, I have been showing my “Google SEM Tools” presentation on my LinkedIn Profile.

Participate in LinkedIn Answers

Show your knowledge and expertise by helping other LinkedIn users in LinkedIn Answers.

Other Uses for LinkedIn

Besides building a personal resume:

• Use LinkedIn to self-brand your abilities, knowledge and experiences.
• Set up a LinkedIn Company Profile to market your own business.

Profile

Create your personal profile, which can be used very much like an online resume (or CV). Besides your current job, the jobs you have participated in the past and your educations / qualifications, you can also fill in a summary, and honors and awards. There is this website section available, so that you can enter your company’s web address and your personal blog’s URL, should you have one.

There is an advantage to SEO your LinkedIn profile. You can use your LinkedIn profile to complement your personal blog in the SERP. A keyword search on my name “Gordon Choi” returns my PPC blog at positions 1 and 2, but also returns my LinkedIn profile at positions 5 and 6.

You can even place PPC ads on Google pointing to your personal Linkedin Profile page:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/gordonchoi

Remember to also upload your photo to improve credibility.

Network Expansion

The purpose of being on LinkedIn is that you want to be within a network of people. Once you have your profile created, you should send invitation to connect to people you know. How LinkedIn works is that once you have connected to your colleagues, friends, and business partners, you will be able to further expand your network by connecting to their colleagues, friends, and business partners. So at a later stage, the more “contacts” you have on LinkedIn, the easier for you to get connected to more people.

Recommendation

Get recommended by people you have worked with – managers, colleagues, and clients can be the most appropriate references to write recommendations about the work you have involved in the past. This can help your possible future employers and other people when considering you being one of the candidates.

“Gordon is an exceptional paid search professional. His knowledge, experience and insights, together with high work ethic, were applied to a successful leadership of a 16 person strong paid search team. He is a rare talent in the PPC field.”

October 19, 2007 – Michael Leeman, Director, Clicks2Customers, Inc.

Answers and Q/A

Participate in linkedIn Answers and Q/A on topics of your expertise. This can certainly be a good way to show your expertise to your future references.

Company Page

As an individual LinkedIn user, you can’t do much about the content on the company page. However, the company page does display employees who are more active in engaging with other users. You should also enable notifications on your profile and status changes, if you want to possibly have your name shown more often on the company page.

Other Benefits

Besides branding yourself and expanding your networks, you can also find out industry and/or company news your colleagues / friends / business partners have been reading and discuss the topics with them.

As entrepreneurs, you can join LinkedIn user-created groups and discover new business partnerships and opportunities of your industries.

Other than all the above, on your profile page there is this one field right under your name (which appears at the top) called “Your Professional Headline”. From time to time, I have seen some extremely interesting and creative professional headlines written by other LinkedIn users:

• Man of leisure
• Senior Manager looking for a challenge
• Call me a media person

I would love to know if they receive more daily views because of their creative headlines! I went for a conventional, boring and appropriate professional headline that simply says “Head of PPC at Alibaba.com”.

Statistics

According to this report of Compete.com, LinkedIn.com ranked in the top 10 of all social networks in February 2008, with competitions from the highly popular social network sites such as Facebook and Myspace.

Other Social Network Sites

Previously, I have also listed other social media marketing opportunities.

You may need to log onto your LinkedIn account before viewing the page below:

http://www.linkedin.com/companies/14160/Alibaba.com

The beta company page begins with a brief company description/summary which was provided by Capital IQ. A “flag inaccurate summary” link allows users to report to LinkedIn for any inaccurate information that appears in the summary.

Alibaba.com Limited operates as a B2B e-commerce company in the People’s Republic of China. It provides a platform connecting small and medium-sized buyers and suppliers from China and internationally. The company’s listings displayed on its online marketplaces cover a range of products and services in various industries… Alibaba.com provides online advertising services that allow branded advertisers to display online advertisements on its international and China marketplaces, including banners and other graphical or text advertisements. The company was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Hangzhou, the People’s Republic of China. Alibaba.com Limited is a subsidiary of Alibaba.com Corporation.

On the page, selected employees of the companies are displayed:

• This company’s employees who are currently connecting to you
• New hires
• Popular profiles

Popular Profiles: These are Linkedin users who are highlighted because they may be actively in the news, referenced in blogs, participating in industry groups, and/or frequently the result of searches and other activities within the Linkedin network. Users who appear on this list have the most profile views at their company.

New Hires: These are LinkedIn users who have indicated in their profile that they’ve recently joined this company.

Recent Promotions and Changes: These are LinkedIn users who have recently indicated in their profile that they’ve recently changed positions at this company.

LinkedIn respects its users’ privacy as it provides options to opt-out of notifications of status and profile changes. So users’ new statuses as new hires or recent promotions will not be announced in the network.

If you don’t want to appear in the New Hires, Recent Promotions or Popular Profiles sections of your company’s profile, go to your Profile and Status Updates preferences and select “No, do not notify anyone.”

LinkedIn only shows names of employees up to and including 3 levels (degrees) away from you.

Company Employees: This is a list of LinkedIn users in your network (up to 3 degrees away from you) who currently work at this company.

The Related Companies section is the statistics about from which companies most employees came from, and which companies most employees are connecting to:

• Career path for Alibaba.com employees before: [other companies]
• Alibaba.com employees are most connected to: [other companies]

HR officers can even post jobs and recruitment videos that will appear in the Jobs module.

People on job hunting can apply for appropriate jobs.

The Key Statistics module provides information of the company including its industry, size (number of employees), some past revenue figures and when it was established. It even gives summarized data of employees such as common job titles, top schools/universities, median age and gender, though the information shown is only based on the employees of the particular company who are in the LinkedIn network.

The information in this section about the employees of the company profiled on this page was aggregated from non-personally identifiable data of LinkedIn users who are currently employed by this company. This data only reflects estimates about this company’s employees and is not endorsed or provided by the company. For questions regarding LinkedIn Company Profiles contact us.

Previously, I have also explained how you can SEO your LinkedIn Profile.

However, the one point I want to mention is that Kawasaki did mention the fact that search engine like Google loves to crawl Linkedin profiles. I performed several search queries on Google and many times I really easily found my own Linkedin profile, though only a short while ago I created my profile. For the purpose of demonstration, I used the two keywords below:

• Keyword 1: Linkedin Paid Search Marketing
• Keyword 2: Gordon Choi

I chose the two keywords above for these reasons:

• Paid search marketing is my profession and is one of my specialized fields.
• Obviously, Gordon Choi is my name.

Another true fact is that only by switching your profile to full view for public, Google can easily index it.

By the way, here is my Linkedin profile. If you’re interested in linking to me, send me a request from your Linkedin account to GordonPPC (at) gmail.com.