Chair e-Course Lesson 17

Lesson 17 is about using some of the applications on your LinkedIn Profile that LinkedIn provides to enhance networking, personal branding, visibility, exposure, and networking. The “Add Application” option can be found as a link right below your Summary Information when you are in your own profile.

These are amazing tools that LinkedIn provides for you to tell others about who you are and what you do through a variety of different avenues, such as what you’re reading, audio, video, powerpoint, blog publishing.

These applications include:

Slideshare for sharing Powerpoint presentations

What a great way to present information about your group, your speakers that have spoken to your group, the range of issues your group has tackled, outstanding successes your group members have experienced through speakers, one-to-ones, or the issue processing. Everyone loves a great case study. You could make a few simple powerpoint presentations and upload them through the slideshare application to your LinkedIn Profile.

Book Reading List

This is a great way to engage with your connections by sharing the books you’re reading, learning about the books they are reading, posting notes about your thoughts on the books you read and the books they are reading.

Box.net

You can share documents such as white-papers, case studies, documents, templates, spreadsheets, word docs – pdf files, stuff speakers have sent you, and content out of the vistage/tec library you have permission to distribute.

WordPress Blogs

If you currently write a wordpress blog, you can link the feed so that the latest blog post will appear on your profile (We’ll cover blogging in a couple of lessons. If you don’t use wordpress as a platform for blogging – but rather use blogger or typepad, you can still link your blog through an application called: Blog Link.

You can use applications to display video and audio, you can pull your twitter feed into your profile, you add Google documents, and you can set up polls for your connections.

The possibilities are limitless – almost – LinkedIn does apply some limit to the number of applications you can have on your profile. I’m not sure what that limit is since I’ve never reached it.

My recommendation for applications would be the slideshare application (get a slideshare account and upload the Vistage/TEC promotional powerpoint so visitors can see right from your profile what Vistage/TEC is all about.

I would also activate the reading list application and click on your connections to follow their reading lists.

I’ll suggest the WordPress Blog application in a few lessons since we’ll start blogging.

Take a look at my profile to see what some of these applications look like to a viewer of a profile.

Another idea would be to browse through some of your connections who are “power” users of LinkedIn and see which applications they use on their profile.