LinkedInformed is coming to an end!

Big news this week...The LinkedIn Corporation are attacking me and I need some creative ideas from you to be able to move forward.

More of that later, also included in this episode I talk about;

• Uplift Live conference - I can offer you a discount.
• Profile custom buttons are really good but are they too effective?
• Verification issues and privacy concerns
• New Events features
• New features for collaborative articles
• More skills (that most of us don't need)
• New 'Daily' feature in LinkedIn?? learning
• Public profiles get a revamp and there are winners and losers!
• Post of the week

LinkedInformed is a weekly podcast which you can listen to and subscribe to for free on any podcast app. These notes are merely brief overview of what I covered in the podcast so do listen to the full show on Spotify below or simply search for LinkedInformed on your podcast app of choice.

Firstly a big thank you to all those who have contacted me to say they really enjoyed the first 'Interesting People' interview with Ashley Leeds . Encouraged by this, I have already recorded a couple more, with plenty more to come. I'm excited to develop this new type of episode - get in touch if you want me to interview you, I'm interesting in anyone who is a regular and active LinkedIn?? content creator.

Now to my big news.

LinkedIn corp' have never been very supportive of people like me who encourage others to use their site in an effective and productive manner...they appear to see all trainers as imposters.

For most of my 15 years as a trainer, I have been able to work around this and it's caused me very few problems but now the LinkedIn corporation have decided to start targeting people like me (there are several others).

I have been told that I can no longer call my podcast, or this newsletter LinkedInformed. They cite a trademark infringement as the reason, which is fair enough and factually correct (if somewhat unreasonable) but when I offered to change the name to Linked-informed - thus removing the Trademark 'LinkedIn??' from the name they also refused this on the grounds that it suggests a 'false association between LinkedIn and the services I offer' ??

My sense is that this is more about being obstructive than about compliance but there isn't anything I can do about it (unless I fancy lining the pockets of lawyers) so I need to come up with a new name.

That's where you come in...

This show and newsletter has always been about the audience, so it makes sense to me to hear your ideas and suggestions before making a decision.

Please feel free to to DM me or comment below with your ideas.

Thank you.

New Features

Events have received several new features, the most important one in my view is the new pop-out player which I heard about from Lynnaire Johnston . If you attend a Live stream video event, you will soon be able to move to a different page and continue using LinkedIn?? whilst still viewing the livestream in a small pop-out video player - similar to YouTube. This seems like a great feature to me as one of the greatest weaknesses of Livestream is that most LinkedIn?? users are not likely to sit and watch a video, whilst at their desk at work! This does at least facilitate multi-tasking which is very helpful.

They do seem to be putting some effort into Events but I'm staggered that the search facility is still utterly useless. The only way to find Events for yourself, without being invited, is by a basic keyword search, there are no filters at all!

Collaborative articles are still receiving plenty of attention from the engineers/developers - I'm pretty sure they will eventually retire this feature but for now, they are still pushing them pretty hard - the conspiracy theory (which has some credit) is that they are using these contributions to train their AI with our knowledge!

Anyway, they have now added the ability to suggest topics and replies to contributions will be introduced, making it a more engaging feature - this is a positive thing and it might also make these articles more visible.

All that said, I'm still not convinced. When LinkedIn?? add a pointless and meaningless 'badge' to a feature, employing classic gamification, they are acting suspiciously in my view. I enjoyed this post from Nathalie Bassanesi

Given all the effort involved, I'm really not sure I buy into the benefits - despite the prominence of contributions in your public profile (see below).

Skills are a feature designed for jobseekers to help Recruiters find them. They do however have some benefits for the rest of us (unlike the dreadful endorsements they attract) and the good news is that they have now doubled the amount we can add to our profile to 100...so it's time to start dreaming up more things you might be able to claim as a skill!

LinkedIn?? Learning have added an interesting new feature to their mobile app. It's called 'Daily' and features short advice/tip videos that are selected for you by the algorithm - mine were all completely useless to me but I never use the app, I'm sure they would become more relevant in time.

The format is clearly based on TikTok with a scroll down feature to reveal the next video.

The rumour is that this content format will come to mainstream LinkedIn as the long awaited replacement for Stories. Let's hope so, it looks pretty cool to me.

New Public Profiles.

Your public profile is what someone who is not logged into LinkedIn?? sees when they find your profile either via a link or a search via a search engine such as Google. The design of these has recently changed, here is mine

They have now removed the headline and experience sections thus preventing Recruiters without premium accounts using Google X-ray searches to find candidates!

They also only show the first line of your About section which means that we need to make sure that first like makes the right impact.

On the plus side they prominently show recent articles (inc Newsletter ones) and your recent contributions to collaborative articles.

These can be switched off/on in your public profile settings which interestingly has yet to be updated to reflect these changes.

Uplift Live conference - Birmingham 21st March

I'm really excited to be a speaker at this first of a kind conference in the UK.

Apart from me, the speaker line up is Stellar!

Louise Brogan , Nigel Cliffe , Gillian Whitney , Kevin D. Turner , Richard van der Blom , TIINA JARVET and of course John Espirian

You can find out more about the speakers here

Tickets are currently ￡279 but I have a discount code (limited number) so if you drop me a DM, I will send it to you.

Podcast fame at last!

I received an email this week

Custom profile buttons are too good!

As discussed in a recent episode, I changed my profile from a web link to a premium custom button and boy does it work well! The button appears in several places as you can see here

The problem I'm having is that it works too well! I've had all sorts of inappropriate people booking themselves in for a free 15-mins chat...and then not turning up!

Seriously though, if you are a premium member then you really should be using this feature - just make sure you put the right sort of link in it, I'm off to change mine now!

Profile Verification

Just a quick word on this. A number of people have contacted me to complain that the process is glitchy and after several attempts it kept failing. It's true that it appears to be glitchy but in fact you might find that, despite the error messages, that it has worked after all!

The second point is about Privacy. Some have stated that verification pushes them beyond a point at which they feel comfortable giving passport/ID information away to LinkedIn?? and Persona. Whilst I respect this view, I would also argue that if you don't verify your profile, you are effectively making the platform less secure and making it easier for cheats to create fake profiles. Sometimes it's worth sacrificing your own needs and concerns for the greater good.

Post of the Week.

This weeks winner is from AI expert Ruben Hassid

I have mixed views about this post because I think it appeals to people that are not using LinkedIn?? the right way but I have to admit that it ticks a lot of boxes. It's a topical and highly relevant topic and Ruben is generously giving away his skillfully written ChatGPT prompt - a skill that most people struggle with.

To be honest, I'm unsure why most people would need to go to this amount of trouble for just sending out an invite. If someone is important to you, spend more time engaging with them prior to sending an invitation, that way you can quickly write a very short message with the invite referring to the previous engagements.

Of course, not all connection targets are active, so this will be very useful in those circumstances.

I haven't tried it out, if you do then drop me a line and let me know how it turned out.

That's all for this week.