Leveraging LinkedIn

Assignment:  Establish a LinkedIn profile if you don’t have one. Enhance your profile if you do have one; join groups and interact with others. Please describe what you did to enhance your profile in the journal blog.  

I’ve had a LinkedIn profile for as long as I can remember and last summer I spent a good amount of time updating it.  My profile is now at the All Star Level and I have over 500 connections on LinkedIn.  Each connection is someone that I know personally, have worked with, or is a member of an organization or in a field that I could potentially leverage for a future job, campaign, or a need, such as printing services, catering, banquets, conferences, social media, advertising, press, and so on.

Each month, I get over 50 profile views (not all of which I can see because I have refused to upgrade to the premium version – I just don’t get the point and it hasn’t been a necessity) and over 10 requests to connect each week.

I also have 18 original recommendations for my most recent 4 positions and 147 endorsements for 25 skills.

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In order to enhance my profile for this week’s assignment, even though there wasn’t much that I could do, I reordered my key skills so that the ones in which I am most interested in leveraging for a new job are now displayed at the top.  This will also help me to gather more endorsements for those skills from connections.

I also joined a couple of new groups, removed myself from a couple of restaurant centered groups, followed several companies, added a connection or two that were waiting in my inbox, uploaded some of my recent work to include the StockBoy startup presentation from Entrepreneurial Journalism class and the What Liberty Means: TN Liberty video, changed my headline to a more current description of my skill-set and job-set, added my volunteer work from the Libertarian Party of Tennessee and in the new “Test Scores” area, I added my MAT score, as well as a description of the Miller Analogies test and the percentile in which I scored.

See the slideshow below for the updates and the various sections of my profile.  If you’re interested in seeing my actual resume, click here.

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I would say that my LinkedIn profile is fully complete and ready to be leveraged for an exciting new position in grassroots and digital activism, youth leadership and organization, and campaign management, as well as political and nonprofit public relations.  Fingers crossed.