The Art of Giving and Receiving Recommendations
Recommendations are way to give and receive feed back from coworkers, managers, clients and others that you have the opportunity to work with during your career. A common recommendation may be a manager giving a recommendation for a current or past employee.
The recommendation could be worded something like this:
“John is one of the more innovative and productive people that I have had the pleasure of working with. John's direct role was the manager of our Graphics and Marketing Department, but his strong abilities and teamwork attitude led him into involvement in many more areas of the company. His technical and organizational skills are excellent, and applicable to many things. John's high moral values and cooperative spirit gained him respect throughout our entire organization. I would strongly recommend John to any future employer, and I hope I get the opportunity to work with him again.”
Recommendations are associated to a specific company or listing in your work experience. I regularly speak with groups of pre-employed individuals and as a way to fill the gap in there experience, I will recommend that they list volunteer activities, these volunteer while are not a paying gig does allow for some great opportunities to receive recommendations.
One nice thing about recommendations on LinkedIn is that you have total control of what is displayed through an approval process. This approval process allows you to make sure that everything is spelled correctly and that it is painting you in a good light.
Another feature of the approval or the Management of your recommendations is that you can hide recommendations at will. This allows you to change up what people are seeing about you and may allow you to put your strongest foot forward with the best of your recommendations.
When you receive a recommendation, you can't edit a recommendation, but it is quite acceptable to return a recommendation to the person that sent it and ask them to fix a problem. Or I like to select the text, make the changes and send it back to ask that they re-post the recommendation. I have on occasion, even rewritten a recommendation to have a stronger branding of my abilities and add needed keywords to increase the overall value of the recommendation.
One of the most common questions that I am asked is, "does the person giving the recommendation have to be on LinkedIn?" Yes both parties have to be on LinkedIn for this to work.
What is the value of recommendations on your profile? This allows people or more specifically recruiters to see what others are saying about your abilities. And from the other perspective, it allows them to see what you say about others. What this boils down to is that it is good to not just receive, but to also give recommendations.
There are a number of opinions when it comes to reciprocating recommendations. You may be thinking, this person gave me a recommendation so I am now obligated to give them one. My thought on this is when someone gives me a recommendation, I like to wait a week or so to give them one back. This way you have a chance to think about what you could say and not have the instant reaction to their recommendation. It allows for your follow up recommendation to have a bit more validity.
So how do you ask for recommendations? I personally look for opportunities where someone thanks me for doing something for them. I will also use it as a way to help with customer service in my business. After completing a project for a client. I will mention that I would appreciate their feed back on LinkedIn in the form of a recommendation.
Next time we will be looking at adding to your network with invites. Until then, I would love to have your feed back on this blog. Let me know how I can help you more. Or if you have any questions that I can answer or even add as a topic for a future post. Interaction with an audience is what makes a blog a success.
NosalCentral is helping small companies around the country with a successful internet presence. Want to learn more, visit our site at NosalCentral.com.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
Social Media Club Dallas - Chris Brogan
Had the opportunity to attend the Social Media Club Dallas January event with guest speaker Chris Brogan at the Angelika Dallas at Mockingbird Station.
I arrived early to help setup and do what I could to make the event a total success. Meet up with several of my friends @kfcatoe and @davidswinney. And very quickly the excitement was building with folks started arriving for the event.
In talking with the organizers, it was a sold out show with 200 people in attendance. Wow, how much Social Media geekiness can you fit in one room. It was awesome to see the number of well know social media leaders from the Dallas area all in one location.
I also had the opportunity to shake hands and chat with @chrisbrogan for a few minutes.
@mikedmerrill president of @smcdallas introduced @chrisbrogan and the event was on. I was being the true geek that I am and was tweeting highlights through out the lecture. After all this was an acceptable practice at an event like this.
Here are a few notes that I took:
After the lecture, there was a tweetup next door at @Trinityhall where everyone went and packed the place for some great networking and Guinness drinking.
There was one other thing that happened that was a highlight of the evening. Once just about everyone cleared the Angelika, a couple of dozen of us were standing around chatting about the event. When from the next theater over out walked Jerry Jones and his wife. Yes the Dallas Cowboy's Jerry Jones. He was pretty cool with it all and posed for several camera phone photos. I tried but the light was way to low for my iPhone to do much.
If you are interested in Social Media you need to check out the Social Media Club.
Until next time.
John
NosalCentral - Your Central Source for Web Solutions
I arrived early to help setup and do what I could to make the event a total success. Meet up with several of my friends @kfcatoe and @davidswinney. And very quickly the excitement was building with folks started arriving for the event.
In talking with the organizers, it was a sold out show with 200 people in attendance. Wow, how much Social Media geekiness can you fit in one room. It was awesome to see the number of well know social media leaders from the Dallas area all in one location.
I also had the opportunity to shake hands and chat with @chrisbrogan for a few minutes.
@mikedmerrill president of @smcdallas introduced @chrisbrogan and the event was on. I was being the true geek that I am and was tweeting highlights through out the lecture. After all this was an acceptable practice at an event like this.
Here are a few notes that I took:
- We are all in customer service.
- Networking is no longer passing business cards and shaking hands.
- Experts say that we can only have a strong network of 150 people. We need to overlap our 150 people with other peoples networks and increase the strength and size of our networks.
- Marketing should be made up of 2 parts helping, 2 parts connecting and 1 part selling.
- Listening is a key part of being successful.
- We should be like farmers... The look for ways to build and give back.
- We should be spending 40% of our twitter time listening.
- We should be making an effort to comment on other peoples blogs.
- What can we do to give value prior to the sale?
- We need to ask questions. Ask opinions. This helps us to listen and hear the needs of others.
- LinkedIn is more than a job seeking tool. We need to write our profiles with a focus on the future and not the past.
After the lecture, there was a tweetup next door at @Trinityhall where everyone went and packed the place for some great networking and Guinness drinking.
There was one other thing that happened that was a highlight of the evening. Once just about everyone cleared the Angelika, a couple of dozen of us were standing around chatting about the event. When from the next theater over out walked Jerry Jones and his wife. Yes the Dallas Cowboy's Jerry Jones. He was pretty cool with it all and posed for several camera phone photos. I tried but the light was way to low for my iPhone to do much.
If you are interested in Social Media you need to check out the Social Media Club.
Until next time.
John
NosalCentral - Your Central Source for Web Solutions
Monday, January 18, 2010
Tips For Using LinkedIn Effectively #8
Groups are the bomb...
One of the things that I enjoy using in LinkedIn is the Groups. In the Groups, you can do additional networking with people that have common interest. And best of all, you have the opportunity to post and respond to messages that are specific to that group.
Lets first define what Groups are. First off, Groups are made by users of LinkedIn. Anyone can create a group even you and I. So if you want to create a group for Breeding Goldfish for Fun and Profit, you can do that. Groups are a great way to talk and connect with others with like interest.
Lets focus more on how we can use groups to our advantage. First lets look at finding a group that we may want to join. Using the Search option at the top of any screen in LinkedIn , you are able to search for any keyword or topic that you may have interest in. Everything from Abacus to Zooligy there is probably a group on the topic.
Many times you may find a number of groups for a given topic. Here is where you have to look at the value of a group. Look at the number of participants that are in the group. If you have a couple of good fits, join both and get a feel for the topics that are discussed. If after a week or so you see one group is better than the other, you can unsubscribe from the unwanted group.
One thing you will want to do is keep the groups that you are members of relevant to your professional branding. So you may not want to join groups for political, religious, or others that are controversial in a corporate environment.
Once you have joined a group or groups, you are able to start posting and answering questions. This is a great opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in your area of interest or expertise.
A hidden gem that is part of being members of groups is that you now have access to the membership list for the group. You can access this from the More > Members secondary menu when you are on the page for a specific group. Here you will find the complete list for all the members in that group. Once viewing the Members list, you are able to search the members of the group for specific keywords.
When searching within the Members list you could look for contacts at specific companies for that you may be targeting for a work search or sales opportunity.
Groups allow us to add a whole new dimension to our networking with professionals in our area of interest. By responding to post we can establish our expertise in a given subject. Then using the members list we can find people in our area within companies that we may be wanting to connect with.
While Groups in LinkedIn are a great way to network, NosalCentral is a great way to gain control over your web presence. Weather it is Analytics, SEO or a Social Media we can help you with increasing your value on the web.
One of the things that I enjoy using in LinkedIn is the Groups. In the Groups, you can do additional networking with people that have common interest. And best of all, you have the opportunity to post and respond to messages that are specific to that group.
Lets first define what Groups are. First off, Groups are made by users of LinkedIn. Anyone can create a group even you and I. So if you want to create a group for Breeding Goldfish for Fun and Profit, you can do that. Groups are a great way to talk and connect with others with like interest.
Lets focus more on how we can use groups to our advantage. First lets look at finding a group that we may want to join. Using the Search option at the top of any screen in LinkedIn , you are able to search for any keyword or topic that you may have interest in. Everything from Abacus to Zooligy there is probably a group on the topic.
Many times you may find a number of groups for a given topic. Here is where you have to look at the value of a group. Look at the number of participants that are in the group. If you have a couple of good fits, join both and get a feel for the topics that are discussed. If after a week or so you see one group is better than the other, you can unsubscribe from the unwanted group.
One thing you will want to do is keep the groups that you are members of relevant to your professional branding. So you may not want to join groups for political, religious, or others that are controversial in a corporate environment.
Once you have joined a group or groups, you are able to start posting and answering questions. This is a great opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in your area of interest or expertise.
A hidden gem that is part of being members of groups is that you now have access to the membership list for the group. You can access this from the More > Members secondary menu when you are on the page for a specific group. Here you will find the complete list for all the members in that group. Once viewing the Members list, you are able to search the members of the group for specific keywords.
When searching within the Members list you could look for contacts at specific companies for that you may be targeting for a work search or sales opportunity.
Groups allow us to add a whole new dimension to our networking with professionals in our area of interest. By responding to post we can establish our expertise in a given subject. Then using the members list we can find people in our area within companies that we may be wanting to connect with.
While Groups in LinkedIn are a great way to network, NosalCentral is a great way to gain control over your web presence. Weather it is Analytics, SEO or a Social Media we can help you with increasing your value on the web.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Tips For Using LinkedIn Effectively #7
Using Apps to add interest to your profile.
Each week I look at a lot of profiles and after a while they all start to look a like. They all have a photo, a summary and work experience. All of this information is a lot like reading through a stack of 100 resumes. A little on the dry reading side.
What can we do to add a little bling to our profiles? Thanks to LinkedIn for opening the doors in early 2009 to 3rd party developers, which allows for extended functionality to be added to our profiles.
Lets look at a few of these third party add-on tools and talk about ways that you might use them to add additional interest in who you are.
The first that I like to recommend is the Reading List by Amazon. With this application, you can show your business focus and show that you are looking to improve your knowledge through reading. Or if you are a technology geek, that you have all the latest toys like the Amazon Kindle.
Use the reading list to make a list of recent books that you have read or would like to read. If you have read something, add a comment about what you read. However, you may not want to list the latest Zane Grey novel that you read. While it may have been a good read, it is not promoting your business focus.
Also use this reading list to help you open doors with people. Lets say you are getting ready to meet with someone for the first time. Take a look at their profile and see what they have read. Use that to help get the conversation relaxed and moving.
Another application that I like to add to my profile is the Box.net app. This application allows you to add any file to your profile. This would be great if say you were a creative writer or a graphic artist. You could place samples of your work or your portfolio on your profile.
Box.net allows you to also organize the files by creating sub-folders for the various needs that you may have. You may create a folder for presentations, Writing, PDFs or maybe a version of your resume.
Another handy application is SlideShare. Slide share allows you to take any PowerPoint presentation and add it as a self-running movie in your profile. So if you happen to be in a position where you are doing a lot of PowerPoint work, you might add a sample using this.
Or how about this option, create a 12 to 15 slide presentation about you. Use this as a way to sell yourself and tell people why they should hire you if you are looking for a job.
There are many other applications that you can add to your profile. There is one for Events, Blogging, Polls and Twitter. All of these applications allow you to add additional interest to who you are and best of all take your profile to the next level.
While we are mentioning ways to take things to the next level, NosalCentral can help take your companies web presence to the next level with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Social Media Marketing.
Visit our website and give us a call to learn more about our services.
Each week I look at a lot of profiles and after a while they all start to look a like. They all have a photo, a summary and work experience. All of this information is a lot like reading through a stack of 100 resumes. A little on the dry reading side.
What can we do to add a little bling to our profiles? Thanks to LinkedIn for opening the doors in early 2009 to 3rd party developers, which allows for extended functionality to be added to our profiles.
Lets look at a few of these third party add-on tools and talk about ways that you might use them to add additional interest in who you are.
The first that I like to recommend is the Reading List by Amazon. With this application, you can show your business focus and show that you are looking to improve your knowledge through reading. Or if you are a technology geek, that you have all the latest toys like the Amazon Kindle.
Use the reading list to make a list of recent books that you have read or would like to read. If you have read something, add a comment about what you read. However, you may not want to list the latest Zane Grey novel that you read. While it may have been a good read, it is not promoting your business focus.
Also use this reading list to help you open doors with people. Lets say you are getting ready to meet with someone for the first time. Take a look at their profile and see what they have read. Use that to help get the conversation relaxed and moving.
Another application that I like to add to my profile is the Box.net app. This application allows you to add any file to your profile. This would be great if say you were a creative writer or a graphic artist. You could place samples of your work or your portfolio on your profile.
Box.net allows you to also organize the files by creating sub-folders for the various needs that you may have. You may create a folder for presentations, Writing, PDFs or maybe a version of your resume.
Another handy application is SlideShare. Slide share allows you to take any PowerPoint presentation and add it as a self-running movie in your profile. So if you happen to be in a position where you are doing a lot of PowerPoint work, you might add a sample using this.
Or how about this option, create a 12 to 15 slide presentation about you. Use this as a way to sell yourself and tell people why they should hire you if you are looking for a job.
There are many other applications that you can add to your profile. There is one for Events, Blogging, Polls and Twitter. All of these applications allow you to add additional interest to who you are and best of all take your profile to the next level.
While we are mentioning ways to take things to the next level, NosalCentral can help take your companies web presence to the next level with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Social Media Marketing.
Visit our website and give us a call to learn more about our services.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Tips For Using LinkedIn Effectively #6
Keywords and Branding
Our profile, resume and our social media presence are all key to defining who we are. One of the challenges that we have when defining who we are is defining things that set us apart from the rest of the world. We also want to be found if we are looking for our next career opportunity.
The way to stand out in the crowd is to have relevant keywords and a strong branding of who you are and what you do. Lets take a look at these two items, Keywords and Branding and how we can do this within our profiles on LinkedIn. Note: these same approaches can be used with our resume and other social media sites.
Lets first look at keywords. These are the words that are specific to who you are. For example, if you are a Project Manager: PMI, PMP, SixSigma, Green Belt, Program Manager, MS Project, Visio and any other terms or software that are specific to your expertise would be the keywords that you may have.
Another example that we could look at is a Administrative Assistant, they would have a list of software and skills that they are experienced with: Microsoft Office (MS), Excel, Word, Power Point, Outlook, FrontPage, Shorthand, Event Planning... Notice that I listed out all the pieces of Microsoft Office, I did this to cover the many ways that someone might be searching for your skills.
So why are keywords so important? Think about you being in a position where you are needing to find a person that has a specific skill set. You might search for specific software that this individual would need to have experience with in order to fill the position.
Now, do a search to find yourself, are you in the top 10 results? Take a look at the people that are higher in the ranking than you. These people may be your competition. Look at their profiles, what put them higher in the results?
You may be asking yourself, what can I do to get higher in the ranking. Here is the key... Review your profile and use your keywords as many times as you can in your Summary and Experience sections of your profile. Use the Specialties section as a place to put all of your keywords. Look at job posts or descriptions for your position and incorporate the terms and phrases that are used.
Now that we have identified keywords and looked at how we can increase the relevance of our profiles, lets talk about branding a bit more. In a recent marketing networking group, we had a lengthy discussion on branding ourselves. What can we do to set ourselves apart froom the rest of the crowd?
Work on developing a unique statement that defines who you are. It needs to be catchy and memorable. One friend of mine brands himself as "the Joe Montana of Marketing". As you might have seen with my company I am branding my company as "NosalCentral, Your Central Source for Web Solutions".
Develop a statement that you can use to brand you as... who knows, the "Stretch Armstrong of Admin Assistants". Have fun with it and you will come up with something great.
Keywords and Branding are an important aspect to having a strong presence on LinkedIn. These same tips can also be used for your resume and other social media sites.
Keywords are also a vital part of a corporate presence on the internet. Want to know what search engines see your keywords look like? Let NosalCentral help you get on top of your keywords and ultimately be at the top of the search engine results to increase your ROI on your website.
NosalCentral is your keyword for SEO, SEM and Analysis of your web presence.
Our profile, resume and our social media presence are all key to defining who we are. One of the challenges that we have when defining who we are is defining things that set us apart from the rest of the world. We also want to be found if we are looking for our next career opportunity.
The way to stand out in the crowd is to have relevant keywords and a strong branding of who you are and what you do. Lets take a look at these two items, Keywords and Branding and how we can do this within our profiles on LinkedIn. Note: these same approaches can be used with our resume and other social media sites.
Lets first look at keywords. These are the words that are specific to who you are. For example, if you are a Project Manager: PMI, PMP, SixSigma, Green Belt, Program Manager, MS Project, Visio and any other terms or software that are specific to your expertise would be the keywords that you may have.
Another example that we could look at is a Administrative Assistant, they would have a list of software and skills that they are experienced with: Microsoft Office (MS), Excel, Word, Power Point, Outlook, FrontPage, Shorthand, Event Planning... Notice that I listed out all the pieces of Microsoft Office, I did this to cover the many ways that someone might be searching for your skills.
So why are keywords so important? Think about you being in a position where you are needing to find a person that has a specific skill set. You might search for specific software that this individual would need to have experience with in order to fill the position.
Now, do a search to find yourself, are you in the top 10 results? Take a look at the people that are higher in the ranking than you. These people may be your competition. Look at their profiles, what put them higher in the results?
You may be asking yourself, what can I do to get higher in the ranking. Here is the key... Review your profile and use your keywords as many times as you can in your Summary and Experience sections of your profile. Use the Specialties section as a place to put all of your keywords. Look at job posts or descriptions for your position and incorporate the terms and phrases that are used.
Now that we have identified keywords and looked at how we can increase the relevance of our profiles, lets talk about branding a bit more. In a recent marketing networking group, we had a lengthy discussion on branding ourselves. What can we do to set ourselves apart froom the rest of the crowd?
Work on developing a unique statement that defines who you are. It needs to be catchy and memorable. One friend of mine brands himself as "the Joe Montana of Marketing". As you might have seen with my company I am branding my company as "NosalCentral, Your Central Source for Web Solutions".
Develop a statement that you can use to brand you as... who knows, the "Stretch Armstrong of Admin Assistants". Have fun with it and you will come up with something great.
Keywords and Branding are an important aspect to having a strong presence on LinkedIn. These same tips can also be used for your resume and other social media sites.
Keywords are also a vital part of a corporate presence on the internet. Want to know what search engines see your keywords look like? Let NosalCentral help you get on top of your keywords and ultimately be at the top of the search engine results to increase your ROI on your website.
NosalCentral is your keyword for SEO, SEM and Analysis of your web presence.
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