Over the past month, I've been covering how I use various social media to gather information, connect with others, document and share my information, and advance my career. In Part 1, I share how I use Twitter, primarily to gather information on what's current with topics I care about. In Part 2, I reveal how FaceBook keeps me in touch with my friends and how I see it as a "place to watch" for RIA developers in particular. In Part 3 I discuss how blogging helps me record my thoughts in a way that is useful to myself and others. This week, I want to talk about LinkedIn.

I've saved LinkedIn for last because, to be honest, I found my initial setup with it to be heavy going. I feel like the interface needs some more work to be truly useful. For instance, when you're inputting your experience, you get a tiny text entry field. If you paste your experience into it, it will helpfully tell you how many characters you are over the limit, but it doesn't tell you the actual target size of the field (2000). Of course, you can use subtraction to figure this out, but...reallly! There are other problems related to the small size of the viewport relative to the amount of text being entered, but I have to say that if you've been contracting for several years, as I have, there is no way to cram your relevant experience in that role into 2000 characters. So it seems to me that LinkedIn has a built-in bias against people with lots of experience in one job (or lots of awards, or lots of anything that goes into one of those 2000 character fields).

However, once I put in the time and effort to truncate my relevant fields while retaining as much information as possible, I found that LinkedIn has several features that are pretty nice.

See who is viewing your Profle

You can often get information about who is viewing your profile. This feature comes and goes, but can be found most consistently on the "Jobs" tab. Sometimes it will tell you exactly who viewed your profile, and sometimes it will tell you just the characteristics of the person (someone in Atlanta, Ga, in the Tech Industry at company XYZ, for example). If it tells you exactly who it was, you can choose to add them to your network, which is free, or send them an InMessage, which requires a premium account. If you just want to shoot them an email without adding them to your network or signing up for a premium account, a little sleuthing with your favorite search engine will often net you an email address.

But what about if LinkedIn doesn't tell you exactly who it was? Often, the information is enough that you can figure out who it was, because often these "hits" come about because you made contact with someone. Maybe you're about to present at a conference for the tech industry in Atlanta, or perhaps you just applied for a job with XYZ in Atlanta. Just knowing that someone connected with an event checked your profle on LinkedIn can be pretty useful.

Join Groups

There are a ton of groups on LinkedIn, so it can be tough finding a few that will be worth following. I'm just starting to get involved in groups, so I applied to join a few groups that my connections had joined recently. The down side of LinkedIn groups is that many people use them to "push" out promotional materials on their company, rather than truly engaging with others in the way that you see on other social media sites.

The up side is that some companies have truly amazing promotional materials. For example, I've been following Tom Barker's "Skill of Interviewing" series with interest, and just as I sat down to write this I got a LinkedIn update from the (E-)learning Network group of a blog post that shows videos of good and bad responses to interview questions.

Get a Job/Hire Someone

LinkedIn allows you to post a job or search job listings. Most of these listings are looking for local candidates, so that's not really that valuable for me in Mississippi, but if, for example, you live in San Francisco or Atlanta, you could find that it's really valuable to look for a job with LinkedIn. My gut feeling tells me that jobs listed on LinkedIn are more likely to be real, open jobs that can result in a hire than jobs on, for instance, Monster.com or Dice.com.

Signal Interest

When you want to convey that you're really interested in what someone does, ask to connect with them on LinkedIn. Whether you've just applied for a job with them, met them at a trade show and would like to do business with them, or what have you, if you connect with them on LinkedIn, it signals that you have more than a casual interest in the relationship. It also gives them instant access to your resume (which might result in another look) and other information from your profile, such as recommendations.

This can also serve to keep you "top of mind," since your profile updates and new connections will trigger notifications on their side. So even if that project didn't come through this time, chances are that next time they have an opportunity they will at least consider you.

Share Recommendations

Recommendations on your profile can really help build trust from people who are interested in doing business with you. I make it a policy to connect with new clients on LinkedIn. That way, when they say how pleased they are with how a project turned out, I can ask them to recommend me on LinkedIn. This captures their enthusiasm while it's still fresh in their mind.

Conversely, if I find someone a pleasure to do business with, I make sure to recommend them. If someone is very easy to work with and pays their bills on time, I want to make sure that other contractors know that they are dependable.

Connect in Person

LinkedIn has an "Events" feature that helps you see if any of your Connections will be attending events near you or the same events you will be attending. This can make a virtual connection into a physical one. This feature is a bit hard to find, which is a shame. If it were easier to find, possibly more people would use it and it would be even more useful. To find it, click on "More.." in the navigation bar, then "Events."

I was suprised when I RSVP'ed for 360|Flex on LinkedIn that so few people had also RSVP'ed. If you're on LinkedIn and attending 360|Flex, why not RSVP now? I'd love to find out more about who all is going.

Add Value to your Profile

You can make your profile more valuable by using LinkedIn applications. By more valuable, I mean both more valuable to you and to people who might want to connect with you. You can include information that is relevant to your LinkedIn profile by adding one or more Applications to your profile. These can help you to keep tabs on what your contacts are doing and saying and can provide more information to people viewing your profile about what you're all about.

Here are some of my favorite LinkedIn Applications:

SlideShare

SlideShare is a service that allows you to put PowerPoint presentations online, and the SlideShare application allows you to upload your presentations directly from LinkedIn, connecting them to your profile automatically. If you've presented at a conference or User Group meeting, why not share that presentation with your LinkedIn connections? Your presentation serves as an advertisement for you and a source of information for your connections. The Google Presentation application seems to serve a similar function, but I found SlideShare first.

Events

If you sign up for the Events Application and enable it on your profile, when your contacts visit your profile, they can immediately see if you're attending any events near them.

Blog Link

I think this is my favorite application, because it behaves differently when it's embedded in your Profile versus your Home page, in a way that I think makes it even more valuable.

When this application is on your Profile, it picks up posts from any sites you've listed in the "Websites" area of your profile and shows it in the "Applications" part of your profile. This means that whatever you're talking about on your blog right now is on display in your profile–your contacts don't have to leave your LinkedIn profile to see it.

When this application is enabled on your Home page, it shows a feed of the latest blog posts from your contacts. Not only does this make it easy to keep tabs on what your contacts are doing, it means that your Blog posts can be piped directly to their Home pages.

Insert Your Application Here

Right now, there aren't a lot of LinkedIn applications, so it seems to me that this market segment is wide open to developers, even more so than FaceBook. I think that we as RIA developers should be "watching this space," at the very least. Maybe you could be the developer who figures out how to leverage LinkedIn applications for fun and profit.

How bout you?

I know I have just scratched the surface of what is possible using LinkedIn. Please share your comments about how you are using LinkedIn.

Connect with me via LinkedIn (please put InsideRIA in the message body).

Read more from Amy Blankenship.