LinkedIn but not quite connected? genConnect expert and certified social media marketing strategist Laura Rubinstein teaches us how to get the most out of this social network…

LinkedIn is the best social network to showcase your professional history including recommendations. Having glowing recommendations will serve you well regardless of your industry. LinkedIn profiles are highly optimized for the search engines. So make sure your profile is 100 percent tcomplete and then make it stand out with recommendations.

All LinkedIn Recommendations Are Not Created Equal

As you may have experienced all recommendations, testimonials and/or endorsements are not created equal. Ideally, you want your LinkedIn recommendations to point to specific results or tell a story of how your services changed someone’s life or business for the better. Though recommendations that say, “Laura is great to work with,” are nice, they are not very compelling or telling of what I did, why they think I’m great, or why someone else should hire me. It was then that I decided to make it easy for people to give me great LinkedIn recommendations.

Create Your Power Resume

First, in order to request a LinkedIn recommendation, you must be connected to the person you want to receive it from. When you go hoover over the Profile menu item when you’re logged into your LinkedIn account ,you will notice a “Recommendations” link in the drop down. Clicking this leads you to “Manage Your Recommendations.” This is your opportunity to turn your LinkedIn profile into what I call your power resume! LinkedIn has a great feature that allows people you are connected with to endorse you.

A stream of positive, glowing recommendations can be an excellent catalyst to new jobs, new clients, and new traffic. It’s very important to get endorsed from your LinkedIn connections who also have great recommendations. So be selective… sure, recommendations are recommendations, but ones from people with credibility carry a lot more weight – so start with influential people you know!

And yes, you may have to summon up a little courage to ask for a recommendation. It’s the pinnacle of shameless self-promotion, asking someone to say nice things about you in public. But it has to be done!

Related: The Key To Social Media Success

How To Guarantee You Get a Great Recommendation

When asking for a LinkedIn recommendation, customize your message to them with specifics on how you want your contact to recommend you. In fact, make it easy and write the recommendation for them and let them know they can adjust it as they want.

Not sure what to write? Do a short poll of your closest friends & colleagues – ask them first, and ask them to list what they view as your best qualities and strengths, or for brief examples of how you may have helped them. (There, you just got some testimonials, wasn’t that easy?)

My Killer Recommendation Formula

When asking for a killer LinkedIn Recommendation, include these important keys in your sample:

1. Mention your positive character traits (friendly, high integrity, caring, listens well, great teacher, etc.)
2. Share specific results and/or a the change that your service or product produced
3. Mention a problem everyone looking for your product/service has, that your contact overcame by using your product/service

Here’s a template for writing your recommendation:

1. The state they were in or the problem they had before using your service.
2. The positive experience they had while working with you/
3. The results they produced.
4. A statement “I would highly recommend ___ to anyone who wants ____.”

By the way, you definitely want to use this formula when others ask you for a recommendation.

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Sample of a Great LinkedIn Recommendation

Here’s an example of a great recommendation I wrote to endorse a professional organizer I worked with:

“Before working with Sandra Ateca, my office was truly chaotic and I was overwhelmed and struggling with how to keep track of all the papers and projects I regularly manage. With her calm objective perspective and expert knowledge, Sandra put together some simple, yet highly customized organizing solutions for me.

“The most important benefit I’ve received by working together with Sandra over time has been the life long lasting organizing skills that I now use every day. Her words of wisdom influence my decisions daily, and as a result my office, projects, and corresponding paperwork are easy to manage.

“Thanks to Sandra I never loose phone numbers or papers, and I know exactly where to find my most important project information. If you want to be more productive and cut out the clutter completely from your office, hire Sandra immediately. Her services are well worth the success you will achieve with her customized systems.”

_______________________________________

Laura Rubinstein

How To Ask To Be Endorsed (with your pre-written recommendation)

When sending the recommend request include a statement like the following:

Dear ____,

I’m sending this to ask you for a brief recommendation of my work that I can include in my LinkedIn profile.

It would be great if you could include examples of results you received as a result of working with me.

To make this easy for you, here’s a possible draft. Feel free to edit this or create your own.

[insert your draft of the recommendation]

Thanks for your help.

To view more sample recommendations visit my LinkedIn profile. Share your killer recommendations and tips below!

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Career expert Laura Rubinstein says the key to growth is social media; here’s how to get started…

Businesses are flocking to social media at an unprecedented rate. Many businesses are growing their following and brand popularity because they are doing things right.

Some brands, however, are like those birds that don’t really know where they’re going and slam into a wall or window unexpectedly. Like the birds, brands can “miss the mark” if they are not focused on how social media works best.

The key to growth on social media is to offer what your market is most interested in interacting about. Before your brand gets active online, start “listening in” on the conversations that are happening with regard to your industry. You might want to use SocialMention.com (a free tool) or some more sophisticated monitoring tools to help you analyze what your market is doing online.

Related:  What’s Hot in Social Media? Ask Women… 

Once you are clear on what your audience values, the problems they need solved, the way they like to spend their time on the social networks, you can design your presence and strategy. To best impress your customers by incorporate these three things into your social media activities:

Monitor and Respond

If you’ve made the plunge and have a brand presence on social media, it is important that you monitor your networks, the social web and the internet for mentions about your business and your brand. The biggest mistake businesses make on social media is to ignore or not respond to the comments, questions, and needs of your customers. Some may post right on your Facebook fan page or comment on someone else’s profile. They may tweet about you or comment on a blog.

Related: 7 Hottest Social Media Trends for Business (SLIDESHOW)

Makes sure you are monitoring your social accounts (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, Foursquare, etc.) and engage with those who are talking about you. Reply to their questions, offer solutions or means to get a problem solved. Google Alerts can be very helpful in monitoring the web at large for your brand mentions and industry news.

For example, Mashable did a story about one sports bar employee was monitoring twitter and when a customer complained on twitter about a warm beer being served, she had a cold one delivered without the customer asking the server.

Related: 6 Ways Pinterest Can Boost Business

Exclusive Offers and First to Know News

Now that you are familiar with customers, what they respond to, think of special ways you can reward them for being your fan, follower, or subscriber. Fan Only offers are a great way to make them feel special and entice them to spread the word about your brand.

WATCH: Privatized Social Networks the Next Big Thing?

Likeable Media reports on how brands like Heinz Ketchup made a new product available to fans only prior to its public availability, and Yankee candle released a candle fragrance exclusively for fans during the holiday season.

Add Extra Value

Laura Rubinstein

Is there some way you can add value to your social media community by educating, entertaining or touching them emotionally. Recipes, inspiration, invite them to ask questions and answer them. Answer questions that have come in to your offices publicly (without naming names). Shout out to fans who made a difference. Feature a fan of the week. Ask them questions. Get them involved and do market research.

WATCH: Use Social Media to Land a Job

Implement these three social media strategies for impressing your customers, and your brand visibility will grow exponentially and customers will flock to you. Please share what you have done to create raving fans on your social networks.

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Imagine leading a webinar and all of a sudden your internet connection quits. Panic sets in and you’re hoping that everyone on the webinar doesn’t hate you. That happened to me and instead of panic, my mind asked, “What are my options to get back online?”

Related: Jane Lynch Teaches Kids Cell Phone Responsibility

Luckily, I had backup systems ready to go. I have an iPhone app that directly connects me with my webinar service. The webinar system I use is Adobe Connect Pro … Boy, am I glad that I had downloaded their app to my iPhone. The app allowed me to get back on the webinar quickly so that I could both view the PowerPoint presentation which I had previously uploaded (so I didn’t need my computer) and could continue leading the class. Phew. I fell in love with my iPhone after that.

Related: 4 Ways to Beat Your Smartphone Addiction

Yes, I’ve had my iPhone for over two years, but really didn’t appreciate it until it saved the day. I also had booted up my laptop when my internet connection went down, because I also knew that I could tether my iPhone to my laptop. Had I been really prepared, I would have had the laptop on ready to go. This is what I’ll be doing from now on. I will also let all students know at the beginning of class that on the rare chance I get disconnected wait about five minutes to allow for me to get back on should I disappear.

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How Important Are Backup Systems?

Too many people fall victim to technology failures. Well, as one beloved IT consultant has drilled into me (hence all my backups), “It’s not a matter if your computer, cell phone and/or internet connection will fail, get lost or die, it’s simply a matter of when.” I’m not sure why people don’t “get it” and plan for these times. Having a few simple backup tools and systems will save so much time, unavoidable headaches, and you’ll gain incredible peace of mind if you just put these things in place.

WATCH: A More Mobile World

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Stay Productive With These Basic Backup Systems

Here are the things I recommend doing for having your backups in place so you don’t waste time when systems fail and you remain productive. If you have critical information that needs backing up, please consult a recommended Information Technology Professional:

1. Please, please, please… have your cell phone contact database (phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses, etc) synched to Outlook or on the Mac iCloud. This will make changing cell phone devices and computers very easy. If your phone gets lost or dies you won’t have to bug your friends and tell them you “lost” their numbers.
2. Want peace of mind even if your hard drive crashes? Back up to BOTH an external hard drive AND to an online backup system like Carbonite. My IT guy recommended Acronis to backup my hard drive.
3. 

   Laura Rubinstein

   Have more than one way to get on the internet. First, have your main computer hard wired to your internet. You may also want the ability to use your internet wirelessly, so getting a router with wireless capabilities set up would allow you to use the same internet connection with devices like iPads, Netbooks, laptops wirelessly.

   That being said if your internet provider service goes down and you rely upon it for your work or daily communications, you can always call your cell phone company and find out the options for either tethering your cell phone to your computer and/or getting their hotspot device. By the way, both of these options may allow for other wireless users to join in on your hotspot and get internet access using the cell phone system.

4. Have a laptop in addition to your desktop. Synch your important docs to your laptop. I use Windows Live Mesh (free) to do this. I understand Apple also makes this easy with their iCloud system. However, using “cloud based” systems is not my panacea. In fact, there is a security risk you take in using the cloud. Hackers are getting into the most secure sites. So you may not want to place your most sensitive documents on a web based server. Secondly, what if you’re on an airplane (without wifi) and you want to work on your documents? The only cloud you’ll be able to see are the ones outside your window.

Read more from Laura here.

What are your favorite backup systems and tools? Share in the comment section below!

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