Let's play TAG

Have you ever had a hard time tagging someone?

Well, before we can fix this we should understand it. As there does not appear to be any logical reason for this, all we can do is guess, and that is also pretty much what we will do to get that person tagged.

Tagging here on one of the publications that you will write and post is a different thing all together. Let's say that I want to add my friend Mike O'Connor here. I can go to the little picture of the chain link to the left of the little camera

... and this will open a new mini-window in which I will type his name, in the top section. In the bottom I will copy-paste his LinkedIn address, leaving out the https:// and only starting with the www. This gives the bonus feature of changing his name into a direct link to his profile. Yay. In the picture above it also appears as a link, but this is a screen shot so it is not active within the photo.

Back to the main gist of this; I believe that the following represents anybody's educated calculation as to the underlying reason that you sometimes have a problem tagging your own connections into comments and group invites. With a half billion, give or take, profiles here, the programs that run this channel must make hard choices when trying to narrow things down for you. That implies running various algorithms to offer 'a best guess' as to what you need. Due to this happening, the name you want may not be offered to you, right away or at all. Here are some things to try.

The first, is one that I have seen mentioned by other people. It can work in a couple of different ways...

Tag the last name first.

For example here are two ways that you could try mine:

1) Pinto Benjamin

2) Pinto, Benjamin.

This second format is used by LinkedIn as a method of listing members in a group.

Usually LinkedIn's suggestions to you will change as you type. If the spelling is a rarer one, the available list of choices will grow smaller and smaller with each new letter that you introduce. Be certain to scan all the way to the bottom of each list before typing in the next letter. Many times the person that I want to tag is someone that I engage with regularly; LinkedIn knows this, but for some bitch glitch of a reason the list that they want to present me with is in reverse order. I end up finding my connection last on the list, instead of first.

Quite often, I will have to open a different tab and look at the profile of the person that I am trying to tag. Check out this example.

This isn't my wife

I have been thinking about my wife as I was typing. I have come to a place in my work and I need to type a bunch of names into a comment section and they are people that I know well. I type the entire list, stopping long enough to tag each one, select the correct choices, and separate each name by a comma. I finally get to the end and now I type my new contact's name which is the same as my wife's name and a long list appears. I see my wife on the top of that list and I see some of my first and second level connects with the same first name. I look over and over, after each letter, and still nothing. I say to myself "oh well, I will set this aside and get back to it later."

Another thing that I do to tag someone is, go back and forth between two LinkedIn pages, to copy/paste the person's exact moniker...

Mike O'Connor LION

If there are many people named Mike O'Connor, I might be able to tag the one I need by using his exact name including the LION ending.

Yet one more way to get the person's name in a tag, is to purposely add an extra letter that does not belong in the name. This changes the list of presented names and sometimes you will be presented with the one that you need.

The picture above is showing an invite page to a group. One of the most frustrating things is to try and tag someone that you are inviting to join a private group. If by the time you are through typing the moniker, as it appears on the person's profile, and the tag has not presented itself for you to select, just skip a space after the end of the person's name and keep typing some random letters. Now, use your backspace key to erase these extra letters one by one. As you remove the final extra letter the name will pop-up for you to tag.

Let's get back to Cynthia above. That's my wife's name so it is super easy for me to remember. Upon viewing my new contact's profile again I realize that my error was a very simple one. She actually does not spell her name like my wife, Cynthia, does. The Y and the I are reversed in my new contact's name...

Cinthya

Did you catch this right away or were you fooled by this example? When you are remembering several names to type it is very easy to spell those names by the most common method. I entertain myself often by simply not typing the person's name in correctly. LOL

Sometimes the name you are looking for simply will never show up. The following name is one that you probably wouldn't find in a million users

ВΕΝ Р?ΝТО

in English or any one language as it is spelled with letters that are mixed together from Cyrillic and Greek. Type BEN PINTO into the search box and you will get a long list of choices. Copy and paste the above, which looks exactly the same, and you will get a message that says:

Sorry, no results containing all your search terms were found.

This happens when a person is adding extra stuff in their moniker's field.

The examples here are for when the system is working but your connection's name isn't coming up. Tagging seems to work with people that you are connected with. It assumes the person you are trying to tag is registered. When these conditions are met, and none of these tricks here work, check with other people that you are on LinkedIn with and see if they have any luck.

Not exactly fitting the scope of this; but, sharing a post to the public, twitter, groups and individuals I have had success by typing in the name or by typing an @ followed by the name.

fin

Benjamin Pinto has created and is developing the following on LinkedIn:

Branding Advertising Marketing extension of CONNECT SUGGESTIONS

u? TM    a.k.a. 'the yoU groUp'

Social CLOSER System? of Engagement (for LinkedIn?)

Brand $amurai? Front Line Training

Crowd-sourced one of the top 250 L.I. bloggers for 2015 & named BlogPoet?