LinkedIn and Branding: What and How?

Often deemed 'the Facebook for business people', LinkedIn is the place to build, engage with and manage your professional work.  Creating your professional brand involves showcasing your strengths, accomplishments, and passions (assuming they’re legal) to your universe of friends, colleagues, and potential employers. How do you want the world to see you, without having the potential embarrassment of pointing out to hundreds of people face-to-face what an amazing person you are?

LinkedIn is perfect for this sort of low-embarrassment-factor branding. Think “everything I wanted to tell you about my brilliant career but was too shy or well-mannered to mention….” Or, if your brilliant career is still in pre-launch stage, this is an opportunity to showcase volunteer work you’ve done, education you’re pursuing, community projects you’ve worked on, etc. Your goal is to let people know you think of yourself as a professional (even if you’re still a student), and you have either created or are building your value as a potential employee.

It’s free, it’s relatively easy, and having a presence on LinkedIn is quickly becoming as expected among professionals as having an up-to-date resume. Also, HR types and hiring managers almost all check out applicants’ LinkedIn profiles before considering them for job openings, and would be surprised not to find one for you. These days, you need to consider having a presence on Linked to be an important, but happily low-maintenance, part of your career platform.

How it Works:

At LinkedIn, the computer scientists get to tackle challenges their favorite areas of computer science—search, information extraction,  matching, recommendation, social network analysis, and network visualization—while connecting talent to opportunity on a massive scale. They invest a lot of time learning how to measure things, from data quality to user happiness and everything in between. From an article by Vangelova, Luba where he interviewed a Data Scientist from LinkedIn, he states that data scientists come up with ways to automatically classify people into categories or determine the similarities between people. For example, they can determine how similar two job titles (e.g., “lawyer” and “accountant”) are by comparing the characteristics of people who have those job titles (e.g., the companies where they work, the schools they attended), as well as looking at transitions people make between jobs. Analyzing data for over 160 million people makes it possible to derive powerful insights about professional identity. (1)

If you are starting in on LinkedIn, make sure you follow these steps:

·         Make sure your profile is complete

·         Make sure your summary showcases your strength in business language

·         Include a photograph

·         Reach out and link to some friends, colleagues or classmates

·         Ask for some recommendations

·         Join several groups that interest you

These actions will help you start building your brand and your network on LinkedIn. But if you’d like more coaching, check out the “New User Starter Guide” by going to the LinkedIn homepage, then clicking on the “More” tab at the top of the page, then “Learning Center.” Also, when you have a chance, consider simply exploring the site to see what other options it offers.

References:

(1)Vangelova, Luba. “Data Scientist.” Science Teacher 79.6 (2012): 66-67. Academic Search Premier. Web. 20 Sept. 2013.