9 Tips for LinkedIn Profiles You've Never Heard Before.

Nine New LinkedIn Profile Tips

1. Be very careful about the background image - it doesn't scale across devices or even with the zoom setting of your browser. A lovely looking background image optimized to what you see when you look at your profile is likely to look crap in many other peoples' views. Visit some profiles and play with the zoom on your browser. Most of them will have crucial bits covered up in some of the settings. This includes by LinkedIn sticking whacking great adverts over the top of your lovely picture.

2. You don't have a profile. You have at least three. There's a little button which allows you to see not what you see (1), but what your connections see (2) and what the public sees (3). And what the public sees can be anything at all - there's a whole bunch of tick boxes for this.
Tick them ALL.

3. If there is something on your profile which you don't want the public to see - are you crazy? You've put it online. It's totally public. It would take nothing for me to find it. What do you think the chinese hackers can do?

4. Your profile is only as good as your last three Pulse publications. The cover images and titles for these are crucial for your profile well beyond what they say inside. Your "headline" is not the headline act of your profile - your last three posts are! These are the first impression writ large, writ in neon. They are the windows of your profiles soul. Each time you publish a new one you change that impression, you change the heart of your profile.

5. The most important part of your profile are the two P's: Publications and Projects section.
THE TITLES ARE HYPERLINKS TO ANYWHERE YOU WANT VIEWERS TO ACTUALLY GO.
This is your one real chance to set viewers on the yellow brick road to your own online & digital spaces where you are the wizard of your own Oz and away from the Wicked Witch of the West (LinkedIn profiles are a trap, don't be spell bound, they are not designed to serve you, oh my no).

6. Shake it up and move it around. You can move sections and subsections - at least the ones which come after the three last posts. Design your own and never use the boring old default structure.

7. Don't use Experience sections to tell me about your job history - I will just click on the first job title I come to and find all your rivals. I won't be back. I don't have time - there are a hundred others like you for me to browse. Yes your job titles are the one way exit doors from your profile to other peoples just like you. So use these sections not to tell me about your the jobs you have had, but about your unique roles within your job.

8. Update your profile daily. Add a blog post or a photo or a publication. Change something. Keep it moving. Each time you be creative with it, your followers will be notified (if you've set the right settings).

9. Now.
Ignore everything I've just said. Ignore anything any one else tells you about profiles.
We are all living in a past which is history. LinkedIn have changed profiles utterly, more than probably even they know.

What can be done today with profiles in 2015 is nothing to do with the profiles of 2014.
2010 profiles are not even in the same universe.

YOU are in total Creative Control. The Game is wide open. The possibilities are endless. Do something new. Surprise me. Wow me.

Interface and interlace your profile with your google+, facebook, blog, pinterest places. Embed one inside the other.

Use the new youtube annotations, when they arrive, to blow the bloody doors off.
Online communication is not about the past. It is about using all the tools you can arm yourself with right now, to send your message. Its bloody well not this black text on a white background.
Your profile is a tool in a toolbox. Those tools, today, can be combined in infinite combinations and infinite diversity. Imagination is now the only limit.

It is called Linked In you know. So Link In.