Seek and you will Find... For me, the questions are slightly different.
Me finding you: LinkedIn only. Face book is happenstance / by accident. Great for personal stuff, but you wanted "Professional".
Even if you sign up for the others, chances are that you'll NEED to Have a presence here too.
Well, I don't know about you - it's just that I haven't figured out how to be in two places at the same time. So, "Why waste time?" I ask myself. Why not make the best of the hand I'm dealt and learn to play one "game" many ways. So, build your profile to disclose as much as you want. Participate on the forums (Answers and Groups) and play with the Apps on offer. Stay abreast of your network "news". Read what others have found has spoken to them.
Now to the more difficult task: Finding Me:
For this I ask a different set of questions:
I wonder what they would be doing/thinking when they were looking for me?
Where would someone be looking for me? (would they be starting from LinkedIn, Facebook or a search engine)
What would they be looking for? (me, my company, my unique being)
Then the Critical Question:
How can I make it easy for them to find and even "stumble" across me - in case they needed to find me "by accident"?
LinkedIn is obvious. Facebook possibly... more difficult.
Why is it more difficult?
Have you noticed though that even though we're all in one place that it can still be difficult to find exactly the right person. For instance, take me. How would you find "Alison Murray"
Where I grew up, Alison was not a common name. It can be spelt in many ways - Alison, Allison, Alyson, Allyson - I even had it spelt by my 4th grade teacher as Aliceson.
My last name, Murray again wasn't very common. So I did okay.
Here at LinkedIn, there were 38 Alison Murrays - enough to start a small firm even though it might be confusing to figure out which Alison Murray was the one you needed. On my last "gig", the firm had 4 Alison/Allison Murrays - so I got to know my counterpart in New Zealand and fielded calls for the one everyone from outside invariably called to speak with. - LOL - No Problem. Imagine coming up with all the variations of Allison coupled with ALL the variations of Murray.
Why am I saying all this?
1. Well, perhaps Linked In Should do Fuzzy Matching searching like we do in the city to find duplicate applicants for limited share offerings. That might make it a bit easier to find someone whose name could be spelt a number of different ways.
2. To expand your thinking by pointing you to a different way of thinking.. perhaps you might want to think about having your own web site, where you can combine all the information you want to say about yourself, all the misspellings of your name along with pertinent key words and all the linked you have to your various professional following sites. In other words to build an online identity. My thinking on this is still evolving, and has yet to get to the point where I see personal branding being the deciding factor.
In case my last points have struck a chord with anyone, Google
"50 social networking sites" and go through the list. It might raise more possibilities to consider. There was a great article last week, which I forgot to bookmark in del.icio.us which had a sorted list of sites - I can't find it now. Perhaps someone else saved it.
I hope this has helped you in some small way.
Alison K Murray
posted 1 day ago
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