3 Ways Your LinkedIn Profile Wins with This Super Bowl Strategy

This “how to” tip won’t improve your chances of winning the office Super Bowl pool, but it can positively affect your chances to differentiate yourself from your competition. It’s a technique you’re already familiar with, at least in terms of observing its use in sports. Now you just have to adapt it to your own playing field: Your Career Game Plan.

We’re junkies for the steady flow of insights shared throughout a competition, thanks to “color commentary”. That’s where we gain perspective about trends in the game, competitive strategies, and interesting details about the players. In fact, “color commentary” is so critical to the viewer’s experience that the broadcasting industry created a separate career position for the role, right alongside the play-by-play commentator.

“Color commentary” may have started as a steady flow of broadcast banter but it’s grown up a lot in recent years. It’s expanded to include a host of rich visuals superimposed over the field of play to “enhance our experience”. Visual elements provide a rich texture of stats, player backgrounds and comparative details so there’s never a dull moment, even in a game with a lop-sided score.

So how does color commentary apply to your LinkedIn profile? It helps Opportunities Find You in 3 critical ways…

1. Bringing Out The Best in You. People are searching LinkedIn 24/7 to find solutions to their pain points. And searches aren’t just limited to recruiting for open positions. People are constantly searching for potential collaborators, conference speakers, book authors, board members, and industry experts for a wide range of initiatives. Let’s face it…uploading into your LinkedIn profile a bullet-laden resume that’s chopped up into dry (and often metrics-heavy) fragments is pretty impersonal. Strategically adding “Color Commentary” to your LinkedIn profile, however, creates a powerful shift and enhances the reader’s experience with insights about your background, expertise, and the trends in your career—as well as your vision and your core values—so they can quickly assess not only IF you can solve their problem(s) but also (and often equally important) what it’s like to work with you.
2. Adding Visuals to Distinguish Your Story. In the same way that we’re interested in knowing more about the Super Bowl players’ accomplishments and history through visual presentations, LinkedIn users enjoy “seeing & hearing” more about what makes you unique when you include media. SlideShare presentations, podcasts and videos can easily be added to your Summary and/or Career Positions. Incorporating visual & aural “color commentary” is a powerful way to showcase your expertise and impact how & where your name appears on Google. It also lets people visiting your LinkedIn profile hear and see what you can create, rather than just reading about you. Last but not least, our brains process visuals 60,000X faster than text. Make yourself memorable by making it faster and easier for talent shoppers to appreciate you. 
3. When You Bring Your A-Game. People shop for talent like they do for everything else today, by doing extensive online research first. Research when you don't even know you're under consideration. Research before you're ever "invited to the table". In other words, your LinkedIn profile can't just put your best foot forward.  It needs to put your entire persona forward in what may be your only chance to impress. That requires the strategic use of color commentary that compels talent shoppers to place you on the short list of people they have to meet.  

So if you did a quick upload of your resume into your LinkedIn profile, it’s time to go back and assess it through different eyes. Give your network a chance to see not only what you’ve accomplished in the past, but who you are, what you can create, and what you envision for the future.

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ABOUT LINDA KEMPIN

Art of Digital Prominence | The Business of Being Visible

A seasoned digital marketer, Linda Kempin knows how to showcase individual executives as well as companies on LinkedIn to eclipse their competition. As LinkedIn rapidly approaches a half-billion members, visibility is key.

Linda held senior marketing roles for 20 years with NY-based financial services companies that included a division of American Express and EY (Ernst & Young). In the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley’s impact on the public accounting firms, Linda secured a Masters in Internet Marketing and started her own business.

Linda enjoys working with…

• Executives who are initiating a career change, looking to energize a “stuck” job search, launching their own businesses, promoting a new book.
• Companies that are announcing new products and services, rebranding after a merger, seeking additional investment capital, and/or joining the global shift into “social selling”.
• Recent grads who want to get a jump on the competition even before they graduate -- and pay back those student loans!

Follow Linda Kempin on LinkedIn, @LindaKempin and Art of Digital Prominence