Ten Tips for a better LinkedIn profile 7/10
Your LinkedIn Profile is certainly your first, and can be your last chance to make a positive impression online.
It’s a combination of a sales pitch, a personal presentation, a business card, a brochure, a personal statement, a list of recommendations, a mini web-site, and a wave from across the room. It has a lot of work to do, and it only has a few seconds to either succeed or fail in doing that work. So — how do you make it a success?
This is the seventh of Ten Top Tips with my compliments, to help you make your LinkedIn Profile more effective. Enjoy!
Don’t want to read this? Listen to it on SoundCloud (2m 11s)
Ten Tips for a Better LinkedIn Profile: 7/10
Tip 7: Tales of the unexpected
Are you the dullest person in the world?
Didn’t think so.
Do you want to do business with the dullest people on the planet?
Me neither.
So — add the odd twist, touch of humour, a small diversion or excursion to somewhere we didn’t expect to go in your LinkedIn profile.
- Tell us that you learned Russian when you were 12 and once opened the fuselage door of a TU-154 in Saint Petersburg when the ground crew could not.
- You travelled at the age of 16 with an orchestra of teenagers as the orchestra manager and made a documentary with almost 500 slides of them doing gigs in front of ecstatic audiences in the Hall of the 500 in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and rounding off the Redentore Festival in Venice.
- The resulting slideshow was played on a 48-foot wide screen with a full soundtrack recorded by a BBC sound expert to an audience of hundreds who gave you a standing ovation.
- Tell us that you once put in the two fastest laps of the day when racing against a professional go-kart driver — and that was with a brutal hangover.
- You once drove to Biarritz to “run-in” a Mazda MX-5, and played Chemical Brothers as you drove around the Arc d’ Triomphe several times at midnight after dining with Samuel Beckett’s publisher.
- That in 1994 you sold a painting for £1800 by a then largely unknown Russian artist to Sir Peter Ustinov after an hour’s swapping stories…
- and that you can teach anyone to Read Russian in 75 minutes.
All of these are things you might not expect, but they are all true, and they are all true of me, David Petherick.
So in a nutshell:
Surprise people with something unusual and fun in your profile. It’s important, even if it’s not relevant to your business or your core message. It’s about you — and you’re unique, not a cardboard cut-out.
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David Petherick is Director of First Impressions at Amazes.Me and makes your online presence visible, legible and credible at I Own My Own Name. Follow him on Twitter at @petherick_ or circle him on Google Plus. Please feel free to connect on LinkedIn
You can listen to all of David’s Tips for a better LinkedIn Profile at https://soundcloud.com/petherick/sets/linkedin-top-ten-tips
Originally published at www.linkedin.com on December 23, 2014.
