JaTara Brown Barnes

I spent the better part of a Sunday night updating my LinkedIn profile. Altogether, I probably spent a good 5-6 hours tweaking my profile. Even with LinkedIn shutting down for updates periodically, I still managed to get a lot of work done.

So far, what I’ve done was:

• added a new catchy "headline" to better reflect me and where I wanted my career to go.
• updated my status
• requested recommendations from some of my former co-workers
• updated some information
• added my websites (this one and StarterLibrarian.com)
• added a summary
• gave my profile an easier URL to remember (http://www.linkedin.com/in/jatarabrownbarnes )
• updated my settings so that more of my profile would be visible to people not in my network (I chose to have my picture, headline, summary, specialities, websites, and contact preferences displayed)
• answered a few questions on LinkedIn Answers
• did some housekeeping on LinkedIn groups — purged those that were no longer useful to me and added a few that *might* be useful.
• started reaching out to a few people on the LinkedIn groups and being more active in discussions

That was a lot of work, but I’m really pleased with the final result. My profile is much, more powerful. I’m not expecting this to automatically land me a job, but at least I have something I can refer people to. I also spent some time playing with some of LinkedIn’s features as well. My thoughts are below.

LinkedIn Answers: I answered a few questions, but didn’t have anything to ask. It’s a great tool for one of the subject matter experts in a category to demonstrate their knowledge, but it’s not for me.

LinkedIn Groups: Many of the groups are virtual ghost towns. A lot of the discussions are full of "visit my site" spam posts and threads where no one bothered to reply. The only value I find in those groups is identifying people with the same interests that I have. I’m not even sure it would that much different than just doing a simple search on the LinkedIn website. However, some of the groups are very active so I’ll continue to particpate in their discussions and network with the people there.

So, what’s my next step? I’ve been inspired by Patricia Nixon’s very thought-provoking post, so I’ll be reconnecting with all my contacts, especially since I haven’t "talked" to many of them in years. This will be a great way to really get the most of LinkedIn, instead of using it as another social media site where your contacts collect dust.

I’m spending some time over the next few days updating my social media profiles. I’m guilty of signing up with various services, but then not following up.  My needs and interests change constantly, so I’ll be using one more site more than others at any given time. This is not a bad thing per se, but it’s never good to let your information go stale.

So, over the next few days, I’ll be updating my myspace, facebook, linkedin, ning,  and ALA Connect profiles. I’ve already given my twitter profile (@jatarabarnes) a makeover with autumn background, a nice picture of me and a short bio. My current blog still needs work, but I’ve cleaned up my starterlibrarian.com website and started seeding it with posts and updates. And after all of that, I’ll probably create my own Google profile so I can manage my brand a little bit better.

Now that I’m actually doing all these updates and cleanup, I do wonder if I really need to have so many social media profiles. I’ll write about this in an upcoming blog post.