LinkedIn is the Modern Day CV

I’m always struggling with recording my career-related activities to keep track of my own professional history. I haven’t used a resume for years because as a business owner, I’m more commonly asked for my bio or background, and I try to edit my bio every six months or when I do something new or significant in my work, whichever comes first.

I did try to put a CV together which is much more of an academic document. While I have a 15 page CV, I ended up paring it down thinking it would be easier to read and ended up with a cross between an extended resume and abbreviated CV.

These days, I think the Resume/CV is LinkedIn. I can’t see being a working or even an out-of-work businessperson without a LinkedIn account. The site prompts you to add your work history in an orderly fashion and encourages you to keep adding relevant activities and experience to get to a 100% completed profile.

When I want to know about anyone’s background, I hit LinkedIn first to see if they have a profile and if so, what they’ve been up to in the last 5 years. I’m sure people are doing the same to learn more about me.

I find myself tweaking my LinkedIn account several times a month, making sure that it clearly conveys what I do.

How are you keeping up with your resume, CV or bio? Is LinkedIn working for you?

Why Do You Want to Be My Friend?!?

I am stunned and amazed by how many people just send out friend invites without taking a moment to type a few words about why they want to connect with me. The two social networks where this happens the most are Facebook and LinkedIn. Come on people, where is your social networking etiquette?!?

If I know you in real life, then I won’t think twice about accepting your friend offer (unless I don’t like you). But if you don’t know me personally, don’t assume I’ve heard of you or know that you follow me on Twitter or remember exchanging cards six years ago at an Internet event. Not putting a quick note to explain why you want to connect with me is nothing short of annoying and dare I say rude.

I know Emily Post and Ask Amy have yet come up with the Etiquette of Social Networking yet, so maybe I better start writing that book now because it is much needed. Some things I’d include would be:

1. Define your own friending policy. Before you go off half-cocked sending out friend invites, develop a strategic plan for who you’ll friend and why. Do the same for whose friend invites you’ll and accept and why you might reject one. This will be a helpful tool to refer back to as you build your social networks.

Minding Your Networking Manners with Socialminder

In the old days of networking, we were told things like:

1) bring your business cards with you wherever you go;

2) make notes on the back of the business cards you collect at networking events so you can remember something about the person when you follow up;

3) remember to follow up with people you meet to nurture your network;

4) an easy way to touch base with someone in your network is to clip out an article that you think might interest them and mail it to them.

What’s the 2009 version of networking? How about

1) remember your moo cards and keep your .vcf (vCard file) updated;

2) snap a photo with your iPhone and tag the image, share contact info with Sharecard for iPhone and don’t forget to find and link to them on LinkedIn;

3) use Socialminder to keep tabs on your networking;

4) email a link to an article you read online that you think they might be interested in or better yet, share it via your social network status updates.

What’s Socialminder, you ask? Find out more about it in my post about it on Web Worker Daily.