❇Recommendations❇ for ✓Recommendations✓ on LinkedIn.

How to Make More of Recommendations on LinkedIn.

A very important aspect of a great LinkedIn Profile is not what we say about ourselves, but what other people are saying about us.

Good Recommendations (of the genuine type) in a Profile can be quite high impact.

Yes, on LinkedIn, it is perfectly acceptable and standard to request public references or testimonials from colleagues, clients, project partners, employers, etc.

But...

... having used LinkedIn to garner a set of glowing Recommendations, what do we do with them? Mostly, we are keeping them hidden away!

Here, I argue that we just aren't making our Recommendations work for us. Instead, we post and publish and comment and tweet so that people might view our Profiles and get to see all the other great things people are saying about us.

That's the wrong way round. We need to get Recommendations out and about, off our Profiles, to make them do the hard work for us, to drive people to our posts and websites - and back again to see the other sections of our Profiles too.

In my view, the Recommendation could - or should - be a major driving force.

Another thought for your consideration. Many of us are multi-channel these days. We share most things not just on LinkedIn, but on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, websites, blogs..., so why aren't we posting these hard won testimonials all over our other channels too? Perhaps it's just because we never really thought to before. Actually, the most likely answer is that these text based recommendations don't come with "share buttons" and that text alone doesn't generally make a good post.
The answer is we simply make them into shareable objects.

How?

My first thought was that the powerful text would be great as part of bespoke "infographics".

Example of Graphical Representation of a LinkedIn Recommendation.

Indeed, wouldn't these make a nice series of posts?

I tried a couple of experiments along these lines earlier and there was an unexpected outcome. They generated more glowing public recommendations! I have included the one by Alex Rankovic in the media below, which is an example of this outcome.

So these shareable graphic card Recommendations could be self-multiplying...

However, since LinkedIn are always pushing their SlideShare product our way, why not make a series of these graphics into a slide show? Hmm... but we can include SlideShare's on our Profiles too... so this means we can now share our made-over Recommendations back again in the form of Rich Media, making them a more visible and more interesting part of our Profiles.

Slides are good, but I like my Presentations to be a bit more dynamic... and to at least include the possibility for also including spoken elements within the Recommendations (oh yes!).  So let's recreate them in the form of YouTube media, perhaps the most easily shared format of all. Oh and then our Recommendations really do become drivers, because we can the also include YouTube Cards with this medium.

I will leave you with the SlideShare and YouTube Video Presentations experiments and examples, exploiting my own Recommendations, below, for your further consideration and for food for thought - this is a theme I will be returning to soon...