LinkedIn has made over 150 changes this year. Subtle and not so.

Very few are documented to alert us, but mostly not, so an army of observers look for changes “in the wild.” We need them. But what a waste of their well-intentioned energy when LinkedIn could be, and should be informing us, rather than slipping them in.

Keeping up in your business while building clientele is hard enough.

Keeping up to speed in your field is a constant challenge.

Keeping up on LinkedIn’s continual changes? Well, I believe that should not be your goal, but a means to an end. By that I mean, you need to know how to use this powerful tool well, very well,  but do not need to pick up every shiny penny that you come across.

You do not need to employ every trick and algo-tease to be notices. Rather, keep your name, reputation, and intellect in front of your readers: followers and connections alike, with smart, useful, in-the-moment posts and comments that bring attention to you as a savant, an industry guru, a thought leader.

Not a LinkedIn trickster.

Be 3 Rs’s:

  1. relevant,
  2. reliable,
  3. referable.

Further, add 4 C’s to those 3 R’s: concise:

  1. concise,
  2. cogent,
  3. consistent,
  4. compelling.

Tack those 7 words up on your wall like I have, and you may print this if you like.

Keep these goals in eyeshot every time you sit down to write. Then other will have you in their mind’s eye as well.

The goal is to be recognized as the person others want to keep up with, not you struggling to keep up with the hordes of others who struggle to coopt LinkedIn’s changes and predict the algo in every iteration. As you can see from this past Monday’s blogpost, LinkedIn not only giveth but it taketh away, so stop slaving away for the fickle master algo.

Be you. Amazing-er, right?

Tonight starts the Jewish New Year so I will be back on Monday.