If you are at all familiar with social media such as Facebook, you will know that broadly speaking it is a platform for average user Joe/Jane Bloggs to share with his/her friends what’s going on in their life. From holiday snaps, to engagement announcements, even as far as showing off the culinary delight that you have just produced, you can share it all on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

The difficulty is that building professional relationships with colleagues and clients on these platforms is difficult, especially if they are able to see what you had for dinner last night, or that you might have forgotten to put sun cream on while sunbathing in the Algarve. Professional connections simply do not want to know that kind of information!

This is where LinkedIn saves the day. LinkedIn is the professional online network. It is a platform for connecting with people who you have professional dealings with, and friends also, but without all the pointless twaddle that one might put on Twitter or Facebook. What it does actively encourage you to put down is basically all the information that you would put on a CV. Academic background, work experience, training, certificates etc.

It also asks you to put down any skills that you have. Here’s the clever part: when you make connections, they have the opportunity to “endorse” each skill that you put down. It doesn’t mean anything official, but it means that if a lot of people are endorsing you for a certain skill, then it could be picked up on and you may get noticed by a company looking for someone with that particular skill. Of course the expectation is that you would do the same for all of your connections skills (endorsing those that you can).

LinkedIn essentially enables you to build a professional network of people who you work with or have worked with or might work with in the future.

Businesses are increasingly using LinkedIn to advertise jobs also. Moreover you can use it to put general advertisements on (though it does charge for these services).

LinkedIn has a very comprehensive help section with articles on almost everything.

In terms of what can be done for business/organisations, you can create “pages” on LinkedIn. University of Southampton have one, as well as the Web Science Institute. In fact, almost every business/organisation you can think of probably has one! It is well worth it interacting with these pages because interacting = getting noticed! If you are part of an organisation without a page, it is well worth it setting one up.

In a similar fashion to liking Facebook pages, you can “follow” pages on LinkedIn to receive their updates. These may include job vacancies.

Alternatively, you can set up a group. These are for people with specific interests, for example the Web Science MOOC has a LinkedIn group. Generally each skill has a group also, that can be joined. Again it works in a similar fashion to Facebook groups. You can have discussions, you can post photos etc.

An example is that whereas the University of Southampton has a organisational page, the staff members of the University of Southampton might have a private group for discussing internal matters (the coffee machine might have broken down for example).

Whereas pages have no privacy settings, groups do. It is well worth it familiarising yourself with the options and choose one that best suits the needs of the group that you wish to create.

LinkedIn also has apps for mobile devices, available on the iOS and Android operating systems. These allow you to look at other profiles, check any messages/connection requests you may have, and make connection requests. As far as is understood you are not able to modify your profile from these apps.

Signing up is just as straightforward as signing up for any other social media. It encourages you to add your contacts from other sites and email contacts too. The process of building your profile is very straightforward and the system gives you clear and simple guidance as to how you could improve your profile.

At the bottom of this is a series of videos on how to get the most from LinkedIn. Well worth a watch if you have the time!

Happy Linking In!

Alex Hovden
Web Science Institute, Digital Literacy Student Champion
University of Southampton
LinkedIn account
Twitter: @WheelsOnFire92

The post Building your online profile – LinkedIn appeared first on Digital Marketing MOOC.

First of all it is worth it considering what you want your posts to be generally about. If it’s just general ramblings from yourself that is a perfectly valid basis for a blog, or you might want to consider a blog about current affairs, or whatever topic you might come up with. The possibilities are endless!

Don’t rush this decision. If you’re not sure set up the blog generically speaking, write a few posts and then look to pull a theme out of them. Most platforms allow you to make changes to your blog details so don’t feel under pressure to decide firmly.

If however you are writing a business/organisational blog, then be sure to keep posts focused on that. As you can imagine there are many advantages to blogging from the point of view of a business or organization. It gives the ability to report information in a “storytelling” manner that press releases realistically can’t achieve. It enables you to write in a more personal tone which is more likely to engage the customer. Obviously you would not “wryt lyk dis” but you can make it a lot less formal, and include relevant links, tweets, infographics and photos. All this makes it far more interactive and therefore engaging.

So the question is, which platform should you use?

In the interests of impartiality I am going to point you in the direction of two of the more popular platforms that are available: WordPress and Blogger (which is run by Google).

Blogger requires users to sign up to Google. Some may be slightly daunted by this, but the beauty of Google is that it is a completely integrated service. You get a number of free functions and facilities from just one sign-up. If you already have a Google account, then I’d suggest this is the one for you as it saves signing up to a different website.

Another thing to note is that it does give you the option to blog under a different name (i.e. anonymously).

I can personally vouch for anonymous blogging. I use WordPress for my anonymous blog and thoroughly enjoy that process. The beauty of it is that unless you share it with people, nobody needs to know about it. You can write for hours and nobody will know!

WordPress allows you to create more than one blog under the same username. You could potentially have several different blogs for different things. Especially in business that could be useful if you have several different departments, each wanting to write different blogs, but with each under the same umbrella organisation.

Links to each of these blogging platforms are at the bottom of this post.

I hope it goes without saying but if you are blogging on behalf of a business/organisation then please make sure to obtain guidance from their marketing team on what is and what is not appropriate to write about. If writing for yourself then please make sure that you are aware of basic copyright laws and don’t write hateful/racist/discriminatory posts.

I also want to touch on the subject of categories and tags. Categories are umbrellas that you place each blog under. In theory you could put each post in more than one category, but for example, on the WSI blog we have several categories such as “Open Data” and “MOOCs”. With tags however, the possibilities are endless. It’s a similar concept to using hashtags on Twitter. That blog post is then searchable under those tags, and it is advisable to have more than one tag per post. For example, the tags on this particular post are: “blogging”, “wordpress”, “blogger”, “business” and “online profile”. Tags don’t have to be just one word, and if you were that way inclined you could put # before each or some of them.

You can obtain further guidance on blogging via a simple Google search. There is an abundance of information available freely on the web. This document was intended as a starting point and should be followed up by further reading if you are a first-time blogger.

Otherwise, have fun!

Happy Blogging!

Alex Hovden
Web Science Institute, Digital Literacy Student Champion
University of Southampton
LinkedIn account
Twitter: @WheelsOnFire92

http://wordpress.com
http://www.blogger.com

The post Building your online profile – Blogging appeared first on Digital Marketing MOOC.