Thanks for cleaning up after me in the UK, Banksy!
Are you keeping your social networking profiles up to date?
I have a LinkedIn profile from way back when, but I stopped using it for a while. I wasn’t doing any work that required it.
And besides, I was moving around the planet (again!) and as a lot of my business was previously based in the UK, I had been focused more on Ecademy.
These are bad excuses for a profile that represents me poorly.
After the mixer event last week, I’ve been gathering information for the Mediaville contact list, which in turn has led to making new connections on both Facebook and LinkedIn.
I’m on Facebook regularly because it serves its purpose as a communications aggregator. I have lived on three continents now – keeping up with everybody would be nigh impossible without Facebook. Keeping my profile up to date isn’t a problem.
But my profile there is irreconcilably personal. By all means connect with me there, but for practical freelance purposes – LinkedIn is, I think, the business.
And because I wasn’t using it, I haven’t been taking care of it. Now, it’s crying out for a spruce up – one of the more urgent reasons is explained in yesterday’s post with Jacqueline Snider. I wrote the content a while ago, when I lived somewhere else and was doing something different, so now:
- It’s all old hat – I don’t do half of that stuff anymore.
- My goals have changed – and my profile needs to reflect that.
- My life has changed too – most importantly I am in Canada now, a move that has several implications, not least of which is that people speak to each other differently here than they do in the UK (Canadians tend to be nice, whereas the Brits are rather blunt!) – and my profile needs to reflect that.
The Rub:
One of my previous jobs was writing social networking profiles for business people in the UK. Yet for some reason I find it a nightmare to write my own. While writing a resume or reference for someone else is a cakewalk, there’s nothing I find more loathsome than writing my own.
Is it because I’m distilling my own life? I don’t know. But it has to be done.
So, I did what any writer does before a loathsome shift on the keyboard – I went online and hunted for good info about how to spruce up a profile and I found this post from guru Chris Brogan.
It’s excellent stuff. I love his work… and wait a second, I was about to start writing about Chris Brogan rather than scrubbing my profile!
Ok. Here’s my public profile as it stands. Let’s see how it looks after a makeover.
How do you approach writing your profiles? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
