Tag: LinkedIn Applications

Using the True Networking Power of LinkedIn

A summer 2009 survey conducted by Harris Interactive for CareerBuilder.com indicates that only 26% % of U.S. HR professionals use LinkedIn to search for the names of their job candidates. This percentage is lower than the 29% of U.S. HR professional that use Facebook and the 47% that use Google for the same purpose.

This statistic reveals the fact that there appears to be a misunderstanding of the true networking power of LinkedIn by HR professionals.

So, what is LinkedIn? Here’s the answer from its developers:

However, HR pros seem to be missing the vision of LinkedIn’s founder,  Reid Hoffman (yes, that’s a link to his LinkedIn profile). On August 25, 2008 , in an interview with Fortune,  Hoffman explains that the main goal of LinkedIn is to improve the life of its users. In his own words:

What I realized before PayPal was sold was that there was going to be a confluence of two forces.

One was how the world of work is changing — every individual is now somewhat entrepreneurial. They’re getting the next gig themselves.

The other was the Internet, which could empower all these individuals to establish profiles online so that people can find them. You’d be able to use your network to get access to people to better chart your path.

I started LinkedIn because changing people’s professional lives is a massive transformation.

Continue reading “Using the True Networking Power of LinkedIn”

How HR Professionals Analyze Your Facebook Profile

In August 14, 2009 I wrote about how web visitors are flocking to career sites such as Hotjobs and Monster during the current recession. More than 65 million visitors checked out career sites in June 2009. This is great news for career sites because that provides a lot of leads for the HR professionals that post jobs at career sites.

Continue reading “How HR Professionals Analyze Your Facebook Profile”

Permission E-mail Marketing Polling with LinkedIn Polls

Since February 2009, I’ve been talking about permission e-mail marketing here at idaconcpts.com because it turns regular e-mails into personal, relevant and anticipated messages.  An important part of the work of online marketers is polling because it provides greater insights to our questions and allows us to have better, more educated decision-making.

I have used Surveymonkey in the past and it works great but I have found that LinkedIn Polls allows polling to become more personal, relevant, and anticipated.

 

linkedin pollsLinkeIn Polls is one of the applications that LinkedIn launched in October 2008 and as all of these applications they are free but require you to have a registered account with LinkedIn.

To access LinkedIn Polls you need to first add the application to your LinkedIn profile:

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Creating a LinkedIn Poll is very simple and intuitive:

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You can submit your poll to either your 1st degree connections or a target audience of professionals in the U.S (this option is free for premium subscribers).  I would recommend to stick with the first option (targetting your first degree connections) because this makes your poll personal (“Hey Mike can you take a loot at this?”), relevant (“Susan, your input is important to me because I know your expertise in marketing while we worked together), and anticipated (Linkedin is a site for networking!).

An important caveat is that LinkedIn Polls is only as good as your networking power is already at LinkedIn.  However, don’t believe that I’m just talking about having several contacts, I’m also referring to the number of groups and associations that you belong to in LinkedIn.  If you’re active in several forums, you can get a lot of responses, and more importantly long threads of valuable qualitative data.

If you do have lots of contacts, LinedIn Polls has made it easy to segment by location and/or industry:

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One of the most attractive feature of LinkedIn Polls is that it makes segmentation of your poll results a snap.  It provides attractive bar graphs by job title, company size, job function, gender, and age.

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One could easily argue that LinkedIn Polls needs options for cross-tabulation ,like Surveymonkey does, and further options for segmentations, but I strongly believe that this application is a great way to gather data fast and to create actionable bar graphs that you can e-mail to your colleagues.  More importantly it follows the fundamentals of permission e-mail marketing by making polls more personal, relevant and anticipated.