So You Think You Know LinkedIn?
©Charles Harris Photography
Like many other professionals, I have invested a lot of time and energy into LinkedIn. There are many tools we can use to help us in our jobs.
In today’s lean marketplace, everyone is in sales. Now, while I provide training classes for employees where I work, I thought I knew most of what LinkedIn had to offer, both on the free and paid subscription side. Just last week, the company celebrated its 200 millionth member.
Over the weekend though, I stumbled across a new function, at least for me, which I did not know existed. I checked with a few other active users of this platform, showed them what I found and it surprised them as well.
Let me make one assumption before I play show and tell. Like many other executives, I am always looking outward when it comes to cultivating my network. Just last week, I spoke on a CMO panel at the 2013 Argyle Leadership Forum in Los Angeles. The one-day event was an excellent way to learn from peers while also sharing my relevant work experience. Naturally, I wanted to connect with people I interacted with during the conference. I was either invited or reached out to some of these folks and connected on LinkedIn. This is what many of us do when we meet new business people.
Now, there is apparently a new resource for connecting with people that are closer than you think on LinkedIn ~ via your educational background.
I stumbled into this new feature (for me at least) over the weekend. Maybe it will be new for you too. I was looking at my profile and, for some reason clicked on my University, UC Irvine. Yes, I am an Anteater but that is a topic for another day. (See below).
To my surprise, here is what was displayed within my college link (See Below).
This new data showed me much more details about the Alums that attended UC Irvine. As you can see from the photo above, it shows where more than 10,000 alumni live, where they work and what kinds of work they do to make a living.
But wait, there’s more.
If you highlight a section, as I did for this example by pushing the New York button in the first column, (its in bold), the list drilled down even further to show me that in New York, there are Anteater alums working for Siemens, Merck, Deutsche Bank, Citi Bank and more (see screen shot below).
I can only image this information might put a damper on Alumni offices around the country as their paid memberships provide access to these same alums. However, from a sales, networking or business development perspective, this option is extremely valuable for all users.
Important note to this, you can customize the year for search. Return to the middle photo I posted. Look to the left of the black bar near the top and it shows the years students attended the University. This can be customized to when you attended the school.
By the way, you can also perform the search if people entered their high school as well. I added my high school, tried this out and the search process came up with positive results as well.
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Photo of the Day
©Charles Harris Photography
