The people you know and the people that know you, can be the difference you need to win new business, find great talent, or build great partnerships. When used well, LinkedIn allows you to find connections you didn’t know you had and re-connect with people you’ve lost touch with and wished you hadn’t.

Everyone needs to decide how much time they want spend nurturing their online profiles, but here are a few easy things you can do to get the most out of LinkedIn.

1. Who are you? Be sure to complete your profile with as much detail as you can to help answer the question “Who are you?” from a professional perspective.  LinkedIn provides an easy to monitor “Profile Completeness” tool showing how complete your profile is based on categories LinkedIn feels are important to having a strong and complete profile.  Shoot for having a 100% complete profile.
2. How will people search for you? Think of LinkedIn as a search engine that people use to find you or your expertise. Make sure to use terms that describe what you do and terms that people will use when trying to find you or someone with your experience.
3. Add a photo. Remember, LinkedIn is a professional SOCIAL network and is based on relationships. People like photos and it helps make your profile more personal. I recommend using the same photo on all of your online profiles–this allows people to more easily recognize you online (as long as it’s not a photo from 1982).
4. Customize your LinkedIn Profile URL. This is any easy thing to do when editing your LinkedIn Profile. A custom URL can use your name instead of a long alpha-numeric URL. Custome URLs are easier to remember, better for search engine optimization, and look better in your email signature or on your business card.
5. Use LinkedIn to find people you know. There is no better way to understand the value of LinkedIn than to use it. Start searching for colleagues, friends, and people you trust. Use your contact list or “rolodex” to add and find people you know.
6. Promote your Profile. Add your LinkedIn Profile URL to your email signature so people can easily find you online and connect with you. Add it to your Facebook page, or Twitter profile. If you have a blog, add a LinkedIn badge that can link people to your profile.
7. Add multiple Links. Be sure to add your other online profiles or links to the ‘Websites’ section of your profile. This creates an easy way for people to find and connect with you outside of LinkedIn.
8. Join groups. Groups are a great way to connect with people with similar interests. If you’re a lawyer, join groups related to your practice area. If you’re a marketer, join groups that are related to your customers. I’m certain you’ll find a group that interests you. But, if not, create one!
9. Answers. LinkedIn has a great Question and Answer section called ‘Answers’ that allows people to ask questions and get answers using the collective intelligence of their network.
10. Companies. Another useful feature is the information found in the ‘Companies’ section. Here you’ll find brief descriptions of companies and all the people you have connections to at that company. A side bar also has numerous stats about the company and the employees who work there.

This is certainly not an extensive list of everything LinkedIn has to offer, but I hope it helps you get a little more out of your professional network.

Here is a great tip that will allow you to take a screen capture of anything on your iPhone.  Simply hold down the home button and the on/off button at the same time. The screen will flash white and you’ll hear a camera shutter sound.  The screen grabs are saved as full resolution 320 x480 images to ‘Camera Roll’ directory in the Photos app.  It’s then easy to upload to iPhoto or email the screen capture.  I like to use Flickit to easily upload to Flickr.

Here are some fun facts about the video:

• The video was shot all stills – roughly 3225 still photos for the entire video, using one camera, hanging from the ceiling for the main body of the movie.
• It took 4 weeks before shooting to create an animated computer generated storyboard for the video, with 3d dummies for the characters.
• It took only 2 days of shooting for the live actors on set to re-create the 3.5 minutes computer sequence, frame by frame.
• Some of the bed sheets used in the video were taken from Oren’s own bedroom and are now considered collectors items, worth at the moment not very much and therefore used as bed sheets.

For more information about the artist and this video go to: Everything you wanted to know about HER MORNING ELEGANCE video

SELECTION METHODOLOGY:
What Todd came up with is a largely objective ranking, which is probably why it’s already gained such popularity among marketing and media bloggers. It uses a basic multimetric algorithm to obtain a final ranking based on the sum of eight sources, seven of which come from Google, Bloglines, Alexa, Yahoo! and Technorati. The last is Todd’s own personal subjective measure.

See the list at Power 150 – Advertising Age.

Venn Diagram’s can be used to illustrate the amount of overlap between various sets of items. In the projects section of Neoformix I have just published an application I call Twitter Venn. It supports investigation into the relationship between how words are used within the messages of all the people using Twitter.

Basically, you type in either two or three terms separated by commas, click ‘Search’, and get something like this:

In this example, the large circle on the left contains a great many small red circles which represent messages (tweets) that contain the word ‘chocolate’ but do not contain ‘milk’. The large circle on the right has blue circles representing messages that contain ‘milk’ but not ‘chocolate’. The intersecting area has purple circles indicating how many tweets contain both terms used together. The number of smaller circles is meant to show how frequently those words or combinations of words are used by people within Twitter. The bottom right area has a small table showing an estimate of the number of tweets/day for the various combinations.

Read more via Twitter Venn. Check-out these other cool apps from Neoformix: TwitArcs, Twitter Spectrum, Twitter StreamGraphs.

Required reading this week at FreshNetworks has been this great presentation from Mike Trap on what he calls ’scalable intimacy’, the intersection between branding and social media.

Read more via Branding in the Age of Social Media – Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog

With viral marketing, your campaigns will suddenly get a life of its own – and start to spread like a virus. Everyone want to see it, and when they do, they all want to share it.

It is immensely powerful, usually having 500-1000 times greater impact than what you get from regular advertisements.

Read more via 7 tricks to Viral Web Marketing – Articles – Baekdal.com

The individual is at the center of the social web experience.

There are a lot of ways, obviously, you might draw this picture, and a lot of things you might include on it. For example, you could group the social web into communities, contacts, and content.

Read more via Web Social Architecture: A Conceptual Map of the Social Web.

As marketers scale back their ad budgets, some new technologies that make it easier for marketers to track the impact of their online advertising are gaining ground.

Products based on these technologies — such as customized ads that show different products to different users, Web ads hidden inside links in text, and online coupons — are part of what is called “performance-driven advertising.” That’s because the products aim to improve and more precisely measure how a particular ad performs.

While no one format is likely to emerge as a silver bullet for marketers seeking to use their ad dollars more efficiently, the advertising industry is betting on these technologies to increase online advertising spending. Altogether, the U.S. online-ad market is expected to increase 9% to $25.7 billion in 2009, slowing from its year-earlier growth rate of 11%, according to estimates from research firm eMarketer.

Read more via More Web Ads Improve Their Aim – WSJ.com.