Linkedinformed Podcast. The Linkedin Show

Welcome to episode 144 and a very happy new year to you all. I hope you achieve great things this year and I trust that LinkedIn will be with you every step of the way! I thought I would start the year with a focus on searching. As we know, the much loved Advanced search feature will be gone once we all get the new UI so it seems a good time to focus on the subject. But before that I saw a few things this week that I thought you might find interesting…. The Twitter account you should use to get the attention of LinkedIn’s published post editors has changed! I saw this from John White this week; Worth knowing about if you publish a lot on LinkedIn. LinkedIn Censorship Following on from my rant about LinkedIn censorship in the last episode I was reminded by someone of the infamous Candice Galek and how much her posts get censored by LinkedIn. I have to admit that many of her posts actually do need censoring as they often used to include inappropriate images but it seems she is now getting censored for criticisi

Welcome to episode 143, before I get into anything else I just want to extend my warm wishes for the festive season. Happy Christmas everyone! Is This LinkedIn Censorship? I posted the ‘Dear Satya’ image on LinkedIn last week and a number of people were @mentioned and several commented. One individual decided to @mention Satya himself and I am wondering if this resulted in the post being deleted by LinkedIn and possibly why I found my account suspended this week! On Wednesday 21st December I was unable to log into LinkedIn and only saw an error message stating my account had been suspended! I had to sweat this out all, wondering what on earth I had done wrong! Eventually I received this email from the safety team; At first I assumed it was just an innocent mistake, then I tried to find the Dear Satya update and my conspiracy theory started to grow! What do you think? Am I letting my imagination run away with me here? Updates The excellent browser extension Dux-soup has updated and is now compatible with the n

Welcome to episode 142, on the week that the roll-out of the new desktop interface has really begun……Have you got it yet? Please get in touch and let me know your thoughts if you have. I found out from a very good source this week that LinkedIns internal name for the new user interface is ‘Neptune’ which got me thinking “How do they come up with these names?” You might associate Neptune with the Roman God of the seas but Neptune is also a planet - Interestingly I read that Neptune is not visible to the unaided eye and is the only planet in the Solar System found by mathematical prediction rather than by empirical observation. Could these be a reference to the removal of Advanced Search I wonder?! Want the Old UI back? There is a short-term workaround The guys at Autopilot for LinkedIn have devised a short term way of accessing the old UI if you wish to (I’m not recommending you do). Here is what they had to say; We found a temporary solution for those of you who have already been rolled over to LinkedIn's "Ne

Welcome to episode 141….the calm after the #linkedinthebin storm of last week! The feedback was great from last weeks show, thanks to everyone who voted. The result was a draw between myself and Angus. If you want to hear another round of Linked-in-the-bin, let me know and I will have a think about who I can invite as contestants. Interesting stuff I saw this week Search Filters are being removed A Business account holder received the following message this week Message from LinkedIn reads; At LinkedIn, we're always looking for ways to simplify and improve your experience – helping you be more productive and successful. This sometimes means removing features that aren't heavily used by most of our members to invest in others that members tell us offer greater value. As such, we're removing the Premium search filters feature that allowed you to apply additional advanced search filters to find people on LinkedIn. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. If you'd like to continue using this feature

Welcome to episode 140, this week I thought we would have a bit of fun with our new gameshow! Hopefully it will not only put a smile on your face but also provide some useful information & tips. But first…… Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week Ransomeware There have been lots of articles and scaremongering about images on social media this week. This article actually sums up the ‘ransomware’ issue quite accurately. The Truth Behind Malware On Facebook, LinkedIn; Google's New Policy On Malware Sites Freaking Scary The reality is that you have nothing to worry about by browsing your LinkedIn feed, viewing and sharing images. The only time you should ever be concerned is when you download images to your PC (Mac not affected). This is not likely to happen, the only situation I can imagine you being at risk from is if someone sends you a message with an image attachment - in this situation, only download that image if you are 100% sure of the source. Whilst we are talking images, I noticed this week that Linked

Welcome to episode 139, this week I’m mainly exploring a subject which many people find a real challenge - how to promote you or your products/services without appearing cheesy or being too pushy! But first…. Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week The three articles I refer to are shown below; Microsoft set to win EU approval for LinkedIn buy LinkedIn files suit to stop bots from data scraping its site I also have a further update on the article about LinkedIn being banned in Russia I covered in last weeks show. It seems LinkedIn have been somewhat arrogant in their handling of this issue which could have been sorted out before going to court (according to a contact I have in Russia). The Art of Social Selling A good rule of thumb when selling or promoting something on LinkedIn is to take your lead from off-line behavioural norms. You wouldn’t walk into a networking event and think “right, how am I going to sell sell sell to this lot”! In reality you would ‘work the room’ talking to people, asking questions, bui

Welcome to episode 138, this week I thought I would address the issue that many are talking about…Facebook’s perceived threat to LinkedIn. Facebook Vs LinkedIn As far as I see it, Facebook will never be a realistic alternative to LinkedIn for online business networking. This however, is not a view held by all and the debate has recently resurfaced due to Facebook's entry into the job advertising market as well as the publication of a recent survey which suggests that C-suite executives are more likely to get thought leadership articles from Facebook. Read the article here; Senior executives use Facebook more than LinkedIn when seeking thought leadership, report suggests You will find a link in the above article where you can download the full report from Grist but the main sections I refer to are below. The most important number here is that only 28% of C-level executives source leadership material from social media. It is surprising but out of the 28%, more are influenced by Facebook but in truth we are

Welcome to episode 137. Well what a crazy week it's been, quite possibly one of the craziest weeks in living history! I thought I would take this opportunity to answer some of the many questions you have been asking regarding the new desktop user interface. But first….. Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week LinkedIn Record is rumoured to be rolling out soon to all members. I haven't seen any official confirmation of this from LinkedIn and I'm not exactly sure how it would work but the opportunity to post 30 second videos to our followers would be great! You can read the article I refer to here; LinkedIn’s Big New Feature – Native Video Facebook have announced that they will provide ways to advertise job openings on business pages. Journalists are getting excited thinking that this is in some way a threat to LinkedIn not realising that the majority of LinkedIn's success in recruiting is through its search capabilities not recruitment advertising! You can read about here; Facebook threatens LinkedIn with job openin

Hello and welcome to episode 136 at the end of another crazy week in the wonderful world of LinkedIn! I have spent this week working in the beautiful and sunny Costa Del Sol, it’s my annual escape from the wet and cold of England at this time of year. LinkedIn have now said that the version of the new desktop UI I have is actually in ‘beta’ ie it’s not ready for general release…..you don’t say!!! I covered this extensively in last week’s episode and don’t intend to cover too much more now because it’s clear that things are likely to keep changing. I did mention recommendations which have improved. You can now see ‘given’ and you can now recommend and asked to be recommended and the option to edit your recommendations has returned although this still needs some work. It’s very frustrating to be in a position to spot omissions and bugs and not have anyone (sensible) to report them to! New Company Pages The new design of company pages are now being rolled out, all admins should see the new design. As far as I ca

Welcome to episode 135 and what a week it has been! This episode is 100% dedicated to sharing with you the new desktop design that I woke up to on Saturday morning. It is still early days for the new user interface (UI) and it still has many bugs so things are bound to change over the coming weeks but having spent the last 4 days investigating every link, page and angle of the UI I can confirm the following; LinkedIn are unifying the mobile and desktop UI’s Recruiters & sales professionals are targeted as members who should upgrade to premium The focus of the design is to encourage more activity This is a massive gamble by LinkedIn! This 2 minute video will give you an idea of how to navigate around the new UI Lost features 1. Advanced search   (inc connection search) Desktop search is now the same as mobile search. You have to start with keywords but you cannot combine keywords with current job title. Once the initial search is performed you can then filter the results although you cannot see a number

Welcome to episode 134, this week there won’t be much to read in the notes because the whole episode is dedicated to an interview I recorded with fellow LinkedIn coach Bruce Johnston. Bruce and I discuss his recent post ‘The LinkedIn Paradox: The Hunters And The Hunted’ which is all about how LinkedIn need to carefully walk a tightrope between growing their revenues (appealing to hunters) and growing/retaining enough active members (the prey) Read The LinkedIn Paradox: The Hunters And The Hunted I think this is a really important subject and getting it right will be critical to the future of LinkedIn. Bruce and I cover a lot of ground in this episode and I hope you find it interesting and thought provoking. What do you think about the paradox. Is this the most critical issue LinkedIn face?

Welcome to episode 133, this week I get stuck into a whole bunch of things. Is Sales Navigator essential to get a good SSI score? First up, I saw this interesting update from Ankur Chaudhary LinkedIn say that using Sales Navigator is a major help in improving your SSI but they don’t go so far as to suggest it’s essential. Ankur’s experience would suggest different! Premium Members Get LinkedIn Learning for Free - well some do! If you are interested in LinkedIn Learning then you might want to read this article; How LinkedIn Learning Helps You And Your Team Achieve More Job Seeker, Business Plus and Executive accounts get full Learning memberships for free, which is amazing but I fail to understand why the higher level Sales Navigator and Recruiters get nothing - crazy! New Feature! LinkedIn Introduce Mobile Update Insights We used to have this feature on the desktop version until they removed it a few years ago, much to my annoyance as I always liked to analyse the performance of my updates to work out best p

Welcome to episode 132, I’m busy with training & speaking engagements this week so I pre-recorded this episode. Therefore if any big news has recently broken, I won’t be covering it till next week! You may recall in episode 79 I interviewed the founders of an interesting product called Autopilot about their Chrome extension that automatically viewed LinkedIn profiles. As I have mentioned in recent episodes, I have experienced several issues with Autopilot recently and really didn’t feel that it was a product that I could continue to recommend. I still believe autoviewing is a valuable and a potentially highly productive action on LinkedIn so I set about finding an alternative product to recommend. What is Autoviewing? Autoviewing is a simple task conducted via a browser (normally Google Chrome) extension. Once the extension is installed you are able to ask it to view a list of profiles from a search result on LinkedIn. Autoviewing extensions are ostensibly bots, i.e. a software application that runs auto

Welcome to episode 131, this week’s episode is mostly dedicated to the big news announced by LinkedIn last week. I believe these changes will have a significant impact on how we use LinkedIn, it’s going to take a fair bit of getting used to…once we have it. Before I get stuck into the announcements I did see one interesting article about Facebook for Work, which is going to be launched very soon. Personally I think it will be a major flop…..What do you think? The New LinkedIn Design This is Amy Parnell, Senior Director, User Experience Design on stage, explaining the new design. Below is a screenshot of the new homepage with arrows pointing to all the subjects I discuss in the podcast; I also made a short video explaining some of the changes and here is the new look profile; The New Feed This doesn’t actually look much different but apparently they have been making lots of changes ‘under the hood’, the idea is that we should see more relevant posts and articles in our feed and under ‘trending’ New Messaging

Welcome to our 130th episode. Interesting Stuff I saw this Week Here are the links to the interesting things I saw this week Your Guide To Generation Z What LinkedIn’s ‘Social Selling Index’ Really Measures Searching and Viewing Profiles from Sources Outside of LinkedIn LinkedIn’s original 2004 pitch slide deck Jeff Weiners full interview with Oprah Thought LEADers A key focus of social selling is to engage with your Leads on subjects that are of interest to them (rather than what you are offering them). There are however another set of people that you should work just as hard to engage with that aren’t leads, they are Thought LEADers. You are highly unlikely to do business with these people but they could be the key to unlocking the most difficult Leads. Building relationships with thought leaders can pay off big time. Your Leads will see you as more credible, you will have your finger on the pulse regarding topics that are important to your Leads and this will also help you write better, more relevant cont

Welcome to episode 129, at the end of a busy week for LinkedIn having delivered their social selling conference Sales Connect in New York. I was keenly watching the Twitter feed and some updates from people I knew were there to hear reaction to some of the big announcements made. In this episode I’m going to dive into the 5 main announced changes to Sales Navigator. Don’t worry of you don’t have a Sales Navigator account, this could still be very relevant to you. But before all that I spotted these interesting things in the news this week; Reid Hoffman is so against Trump, he created a card game! LinkedIn Siri integration goes live with the launch of iOS 10 3 new LinkedIn services in India Sales Connect 2016 I wasn’t able to make it to New York but I did the next best thing and followed on Twitter. Various speakers talked about the exciting world of social selling including several case studies, Chris Anderson from TED talks appeared to be the most popular but I bet Malcolm Gladwell was pretty good too! Vari

Welcome to episode 128, this week I want to revisit the subject of advertising. Firstly some interesting stuff I saw this week; A company called We are Flint interviewed just over 2000 UK adults to determine the level of social media usage. The results for LinkedIn make interesting reading; LinkedIn Advertising This still seems to be a thorny issue for LinkedIn with another set of less than inspiring results announced recently. In Q2 marketing revenue was $181, just 19% of their income and over 60% of this came from sponsored updates. You may recall we covered advertising in episodes 85. 92 and 94 when listener Peter Gold experimented with LinkedIn ads. The conclusion wasn't very positive! So I was intrigued when I came across someone who describes himself as a ‘LinkedIn ads evangelist’! AJ kindly gave up some of his time to chat with me this week about LinkedIn ads. How they work and who should and who shouldn’t be using them. It’s a fascinating insight and finally puts to bed the question once and for all.

Welcome to episode 127, I hope you all had a fantastic week. In this episode I attempt to get my head around the millennial problem - i.e. Why don’t Millennials use LinkedIn? Firstly though a few things I found interesting this week; New content search on the LinkedIn app LinkedIn Profinder expands to the whole of the US New iOS 10 launch this month will include deeper SIRI integration into LinkedIn The Millennial Question I read a very interesting article this week from Allen M. Quinn titled 5 Reasons Why Millenials Aren’t Using LinkedIn. I thought this was a very interesting subject and worth further consideration. As a father of two millennials (who are both nowhere near LinkedIn!) I have a particular perspective to bring to the issue and it struck me that you might also. I contacted the author Allen and despite viewing my profile, he didn’t come back to me - Bloody Millennials!!! To be fair, I only reached out yesterday so he may come back yet but I was unable to arrange to interview him for this episod

Welcome to episode 126, this week was a special week for me as I had the opportunity to attend a two day InStruct course at LinkedIn’s office in London. In this episode I want to address two topics; The experience of spending time with LinkedIn An update on Sales Navigator InStruct is a training programme designed to assist those responsible for implementing and managing the adoption of Sales Navigator in their organisation. It is in effect a ‘train the trainer’ course but is really aimed at corporate in-house trainers rather than an independent external trainer such as myself. Sales Navigator is a premium upgrade version of LinkedIn designed for sales professionals with a focus on a social selling methodology. LinkedIn London In the 8 years I have been a LinkedIn trainer my relationship with LinkedIn has had it’s ups and downs. In the early days of the London office I met some great people who I developed trusting and productive relationships with. Things seemed to change around 2011 when the company went

Welcome to episode 125, I’m back from an amazing holiday in Italy and the English Cotswolds so plenty to catch up on this week…… Whilst away my Linkedin messages built up and it occurred to me that LinkedIn could really do with  an ‘out of office’ auto reply feature similar to that which you get with emails. LinkedIn is unique in that being work related, people are less likely to login whilst they are on holiday. LinkedIn are renown for copying features from other social media sites but on this one I would like to see them innovate. What do you think? Autopilot Due to a string of problems I have stopped using Autopilot for LinkedIn and can no longer recommend it. I still believe in the idea of auto viewing though and I am looking into a couple of alternatives. I will keep you informed. The data scraping bots issue LinkedIn sues 100 individuals for scraping user data from the site LinkedIn suffers huge bot attack that steals members’ personal data   LinkedIn are saying very little about this but the lawsuit th