LinkedIn — Recommendations for Newbies

Use a Personal Email Address

It is my recommendation that you use a personal email address (gmail, hotmail, etc.) as the email address that you log into LinkedIn with. This way, if you ever leave the company you won't have to change a thing.

Getting Started — Build Your Profile

Before you start "getting connected" with your peers on LinkedIn you should build your profile. It doesn't have to be perfect the first time around. What's most important is that you create entries for every place you've worked and every place you went to school. You can start with simple descriptions of your achievements at your various career points but don't sweat it at first.

Privacy Settings

As I became increasingly connected with customers, former colleagues, and industry partners—I became more concerned about someone being tempted to "browse my connections" to pick up their next potential sales lead (i.e. one of my customers). Also, I'm in the banking industry—where privacy is paramount. To prevent my "connections" from being an "open book" I changed the privacy setting to prevent people from browsing my connections. It felt like the prudent thing to do.

To prevent the people you are connected to from being able to freely browse all the other people you're connected to you simply have to go into "Account Settings" and then go into the Privacy Settings section and change the setting to prevent people from browsing. The advantage of this, I've found, is that I'm no longer shy about connecting with people in my industry who may also be considered a competitor. Also, if a person you're connected to is connected to the same person this fact will be revealed to them (which is OK in my books).

Also, if you're in the middle of reworking your profile you can prevent people from being notified every time you update it with "Profile and Update Status" settings (also under the "Privacy Settings" section of your Account Settings.

Get Connected!

Now that you have your profile filled out it is easy to add connections. Simply click on Contacts (on the left hand side of the home page) and then click on "Add Connections" (to the right) and you'll see a tab with Colleagues. Click on Colleagues and you'll be presented with a list of all the companies you've worked for and you'll be able to get re-connected with many of these folks. Another way to add connections is to simply do it by sending an invitation to an email address.