Your Linkedin profile is not like a CV or resume – I’m going to use CV as its fewer letters and I’m lazy. A CV should be more specific, when I looked for a job I would have different CVs for different industries, if I was looking at banking roles I had finance things highlighted and with more detail, if I was looking for consulting gigs I had consulting type roles and accomplishments highlighted. My internet company CV was specifically peppered with my technical and product capabilities.

A Linkedin profile should be updated constantly, should have your recent wins and metrics. The focus should be on getting people who’ve worked with you to recommend you – thanks to everyone who’s recommended me on my profile btw! The reason is that you never know who or why someone’s looking at your profile. It could be a recruiter but it could also be a potential partner, customer, or some other relationship that will grow out of Linkedin. You should have some recommendations from colleagues, managers, suppliers and customers if possible. This covers you regardless of who’s looking at your Linkedin profile. Before I had the landing page for AdAvengers.com ready I had “stealth mode” as the company I worked for, when it was ready I changed it. I’ve already got a recommendation on the latest role and it’s for my contracting work not for the work that I’m hoping Ad Avengers will end up doing. Doesn’t matter, what matters is that people see your doing something – anything – of value for someone – anyone!

If you’re lucky you’ll spend most of your time employed rather than looking for a new gig. Your Linkedin profile is like a Google search for you or like your twitter account, i.e. organic and alive. It should reflect the person you are and not focus on a specific role. Think of it as a funnel, your profile is a tool to get people to find out more about you, to ask someone they know about you, or to ask you if you’re interested in a role or opportunity and that’s when you focus on the specifics about the role and your fit for it (in your CV), not when you’re doing your Linkedin profile.

So here are some of my basic’s for a successful Linkedin profile:

• reflect your character, think of three words you want someone to think of when they read your profile and then write your copy
• ask for specific recommendations from people you’ve done work for, and who worked with you on work you’re proud of
• recommend people, people you really like and would want to work with / for/ or have working for you again
• use metrics when you can – from budgets to impact
• Highlight brands that you worked for – if you worked for a big brand, lucky you, if you worked for brands that aren’t so big outline what they did and if they had big brands as clients
• join groups and participate wherever you can – you never know when a connection might be made
• If you’re on twitter then connect your Linkedin profile – at least highlight it in your profile and send the occasional post to both Linkedin and twitter (Tweetdeck is great for this)
• Be careful of highlighting your credentials in your profile title, I get pretty annoyed with people who have Firstname, Lastname, MBA in their profile,  imagine how someone who thinks MBA’s are useless would feel about that (and believe it or not there are people who feel this way)
• Make a significant amount of content available to all, so anyone looking at your profile can get a decent understanding of you without clicking the “View full profile” link
• update frequently – don’t wait till you’re actually looking for a job, you might miss a customer / supplier / partner

Funny enough, Seth Godin has a great blog post today about what kind of story you tell about yourself, your Linkedin page should tell a story about you.

If there’s any truth to the Simmons-Smith Lebron-Wade-Bosh-Paul conspiracy to all play together (note: that post is a must read for all ball fans) than this is even worse than I thought. Lebron was playing for a move to Miami and that explains his no-show against the Celtics in the playoffs and Bosh mailed it in while he was in his last season in Toronto as well. I’m getting angrier as I write this.

The point is that if you’re going to make a decision that has a huge impact on a number of different stakeholders be careful how you package the announcement. Durant has won a lot of praise for the class he has shown, by not making it a big deal and by signing with the team that brought him into the league and is assembling a really good young nucleus. Lebron in comparison has dragged the city of Cleveland, where he grew up and grew famous through a really bitter off-season not revealing his hand. Don’t even get me started on Chris Bosh.

I hope none of these guys wins a title for Miami. If there’s any truth to the idea that what goes around comes around, Miami will lose to Orlando or Boston or Chicago, or the Lakers, or Durant and the thunder. I won’t be rooting for these guys even if Lebron does go to the Knicks with Amar’e, unlike Simmons who believes he could sign off on a decision to bring basketball back in the Mecca, I just couldn’t bring my self to root for a guy who acted so carelessly.
This could have all been avoided if some of these players had just shown more class, more dignity more loyalty to their franchises and less selfishness. More Kevin Durant less Lebron James.

Here’s the thing, it’s nothing new! Sony Ericsson had a video calling phone more than a few years ago. A colleague at Yahoo! reminded everyone about this with his tweet and link to some Germans on YouTube making avideo call using the Sony Ericsson k-800.

The difference is that the experience is way better now than it was then. The resolution, the camera’s and wifi mean that you’re not dependent on network access and it can be a pretty good experience. That’s all pretty big. Overall the technology is ready for mainstreaming, and Apple is great at releasing a technology when it’s ready for mainstreaming.

Launch a service too early and it’s restricted to the UberGeeks’s of the world. I have friends who had Sony Ericsson phones with video calling capability, problem was as most of us weren’t ready for the calling capability these friends spent most of their time using the phone and texting rather than video calling. It’s like people using email in 1991, facebook in 2001, twitter in 2008 etc. If the network isn’t ready for the technology it’s not going to really get adopted. I call this my technology mainstreaming theory and I’ve drawn up a little visual explaining the principle and how this might apply to video calls. Apple is potentially right on the money, launching right when the technology is ready for mainstream, I expect Android to follow suit quickly, and the fine folks at RIM, Windows to lag a bit – don’t even get me started as to when Nokia and Samsung will catch on.

(Note – if you have trouble seeing this, click on it for notes on the flickr page)

This seems to be a general trait with Sony Ericsson, they seem to be great at creating things when the technology is there, rather than when the technology has matured to a point where it becomes a really good experience. Which is what Apple’s doing here and done since their foray into smart phones.

As well, by launching Facetime as an open standard Apple’s hoping other phone manufacturers will build on it, but I’m sure they’re banking on most people wanting to buy and use the video calling capabilities on the iPhone 4. Not a bad bet by Apple.

Personally, I think the idea of eating your own dog food is bull. If you’re a dog maybe this works but if you’re a human being with some idea for taste, quality, performance and functionality dog food is just that, food for dogs. How do you get better than the competition if you don’t know just how good the competition is? How do you succeed if you’re not familiar with what works in the market?

My belief is that employees should be charged with making products they want to use, and that the aim of the corporation to be to build products so much better than the competition that people inside the company don’t want to use other products, but rather become evangelists for your products to their friends and contacts outside of the company.

If you work in a company where people within the company are using your competitions products or services, don’t out law it, charge them with the idea to build products better than the ones their using now. Get people to build something, use it for two weeks and then see if they switch, if not, why not? Can you fix it, can you make it better, do it, switch again, and now? Repeat often until your employees switch to your own product by choice. I call this the “stop eating dog food and start making caviar” or “caviar” approach to product selection and development in an organisation, i wonder if it will stick.

Now this is Jim Joyce, an umpire who made a mistake on a baseball play that costed Armando Galarraga a perfect game, he’s contrite, he says things like “I missed it… I kicked the sh*t out of it, nobody feels worse than I do, I took a perfect game away from this kid”…:

When you mess up, take responsibility and apologise. Be honest and upfront and say you’re sorry. Joyce did this, he found Galarraga and apologized after wards and everybody was big and understanding.

Zuckerberg and Facebook continually do things with privacy and instead of being honest and quick with an apology they act defensive and put the blame on users rather than accepting the issues on their site. This is one of the reasons why my pictures will be on flickr, my blog posts will be here and not on Facebook and my status messages will be on twitter and linkedin as well as facebook. I’m not naïve, I’m not going to quit Facebook, it’s too big a part of my communication with people, but it won’t be the only place I store information and a lot of this decision has to do with the way the company handles themselves and their apologies.

When you allow an advertiser to buy the whole page, change your background and put some crap over your content, here’s what I believe you’re saying – “Your advertising dollars are worth more than our costumers experience and our product, so allow us to bend over while you have your way with both”.

Here’s a bolt of reality to media owners; consumers, costumers, PEOPLE don’t like advertising, they tolerate it. We understand that there’s a need for businesses to make money so heck show some ads, some body somewhere will think that this Vodka ad on the side of my NBA scores page is relevant and someone will click, it just won’t be me.

Your content, product, whatever you own, better be twice as good as the competition if you’re going to submit your audience to a takeover of your content by an advertiser, because if it’s not, odds are that some portion of your audience won’t come back. Cause wherever you have people doing it for the money, you have people doing it better for the content and for the audience.

So here’s my advice, stop pimping your products out to advertisers. Stop bending over to make an extra couple of bucks. Start offering advertisers better alternatives, creative widgets or whatever that don’t harm the consumer experience but rather enhance it. Start really focusing on creating a better experience for people. Or accept that you’re lazy, don’t care about the people using your product and are out to make a quick buck and watch your product suffer in the long run.

I’ve been hearing lot’s of people talk about how companies can be good or evil. A lot of this goes back to Google’s whole “Don’t be evil” line that was the unofficial motto around the company a while back. Part of it is due to Umair Haque’s manifesto’s and blog posts. Don’t get me wrong, I respect a lot of what Umair writes and I like a lot of what Google does, but I just don’t think it’s that black and white.

Companies are made up of people, and people are at the heart of the organisation’s direction and choices around strategy, marketing, procurement, M&A and everything else. Calling companies good and evil misses out on the spectrum between these extremes.

Google for example has made lot’s of “Good” decisions, for the good of costumers, for the good of partners, for the good of the developer community, but they’ve also made a lot of bad decisions, Buzz integration with Gmail without opt-in, what they did to Dodgeball and whole lot of other stuff could be classified as “Evil” by some people.

Apple, Twitter, Microsoft, Sony almost any media, technology company I can think of has done some things that I would consider good and some things that I wouldn’t. So classifying an entire company as good or evil just leaves me feeling a bit uneasy.

Here’s my suggestion, let’s ditch the whole good and evil and start talking about the character of an organisation. Let’s make it a spectrum and a scale. Are they transparent, sustainable, honest and consistent in their policies and actions? Do they value the community, employees, costumers, partners and the developers who may power their community? Are they closed or open – is that consistent across products and services?

This is separate to the quality and performance of the company’s goods or services. Nestle would probably score really lowly on the character scale but damn if I could resist their KitKats. Apple may also score lowly but I’ll still probably buy an iPad and add this to our suite of Apple products in the house. But at least I know it’s not a company with character, just a company with good products.

A company that is transparent and clear in it’s financial management and strategy, that has a sustainable policy and tries to operate in a energy efficient manner, which shows obvious care and concern for all their stakeholders and that works in an open manner with open protocols across it’s product suite would be the holy grail of character and would score a 10. Not sure if any company meets this but that should be the aim.
A company that isn’t transparent, doesn’t value stakeholders, is not green in any way shape or form, doesn’t prescribe to open protocols or integration with other services would score really poorly.

This is separate to the quality and performance of the company’s goods or services. Nestle would probably score really lowly on the character scale but damn if I could resist their KitKats. Apple may also score lowly but I’ll still probably buy an iPad and add this to our suite of Apple products in the house. But at least I know it’s not a company with character, just a company with good products. This is what separates discussing awesomeness versus character. Awesomeness can mean great execution, great products, but that doesn’t mean a company is “good”, what talking about character does is it gives us a clear scale and overview of a companies principles.

I originally wanted to call this blog post “Calling Bullsh*t on Good and Evil in Business” but heck who am I to suggest it’s bullsh*t maybe there is a place for it. I just don’t think it gives us as a community enough tools to discuss the principles of an organisation. So let’s try and stop all the good and evil clear cut analysis of decisions and talk about companies with colour, I think this would be more beneficial to the conversations and analysis that is happening about companies today. Just how much character does your company have?

Let me explain. I hear of a new artist, let’s call her Lady Gaga Queen Mo Mo for interest sake. She get’s a couple of plays on MTV but I’m never home to watch her videos so I don’t really get to know Queen Momo ‘s songs. I don’t really listen to the radio, I prefer listening to on my PC and discovery through radio and video doesn’t happen as much as it used to for me personally. I discover music through services like Hype Machine and Spotify. Lucky for me Queen Momo has a lot of music on Hype Machine and on Spotify, I listen to a bunch of tracks and quickly become a fan. I check out her videos for her songs like Mobile Phone and her duet with Kelly Roland called Voice mail and I like her so much so that when she’s in town I buy tickets for me and the Bee for £50 each to see her when she’s in town. Not only that but I share music of her’s that I’m listening to on Twitter and Facebook and lead to three other people discovering her, one buys a CD, one goes to see her in concert and one downloads her album on iTunes.

So Queen Momo didn’t make a lot out of all the different streams or videos that I listened to or watched, but she made 100 quid directly from me when I went to see her in concert and a whole lot more from my sharing my interest in her. Just me, one customer. She also made more out of me as I then went on to buy her next album so the Bee could have it on her iPod. Here’s the thing though, would I have discovered her and become a fan had I not listened to her on Spotify and Hype Machine, maybe but probably not.

Okay so the “hypothetical example” is over and it’s actually pretty close to what the Independent’s written about Spotify and Lady Gaga. But, while it’s easy to track payments from one service and say it doesn’t contribute fairly as the Independent and various unions have done with the Lady Gaga example. What this doesn’t track is how many users discovered Lady Gaga or listened to Lady Gaga on Spotify or worse yet on file sharing sites in the UK and then went and saw her at the O2 or actually bought her CD. Studies have shown that users who use filesharing sites actually buy more music than people who don’t.

The point is that just because we can’t clearly attribute contribution from different channels doesn’t mean they don’t contribute positively to an artists overall income. File sharing and Spotify need to be treated as the new form of brand advertising in that they help artists (brands) build a reputation that then leads to sales. Shutting down or trying poorly scripted laws to protect the industries is as harmful as saying to artists radio or posters promoting your music is illegal.

Seth Godin is amazing. He’s conceived the idea and put the team together to share a free book called “What matters now”. A bunch of really smart people have contributed a page each about a concept that really matters to them. The people in the book are amazing. Some of the people are people who’s books, lectures, blogs etc I’ve been following for some time, people like Fred Wilson, Tony Hsieh, Chris Anderson, Hugh Macleod and a lot of others – sorry I’m too lazy to link to all of them, but if you don’t know who those people are do a search for ‘em. And there’s some people I haven’t heard of before as well. It’s a great little book, sharing little bits of wisdom and I’m sure everyone would find some information that’s inspiring in there. Here’s the kicker though. It’s free! People are tweeting about it, people are downloading it, other really smart people are blogging about it. And it’s a great way to promote all the people in there as well as a great charity, www.roomtoread.org. In short it’s amazing.

Zappos is amazing. I met Alfred, the COO/CFO at Zappos last week in Paris, and I heard Tony Hsieh the CEO, speak in Paris as well. One of the things that really got me was that they have a culture book written by the employees and they give it for free to anyone who asks. I couldn’t believe it. So I emailed Zappos and asked for a copy to be sent to Switzerland. It arrived in literally 3 business days. 3 BUSINESS DAYS TO SWITZERLAND. I’m not a customer, I can’t be a customer as they don’t serve to Europe! And they still sent me a copy with some kind of priority post. That’s amazing.

I truly believe being amazing is key. If you can amaze people they’ll write about you, they’ll tell people about you, they’ll buy your product and most importantly they’ll use you over and over again. Being amazing might not be the most profitable, but squeezing margin could hurt your business in the long term (service suffering), being amazing is the key to sustainability. Zappos and Seth aren’t alone, but they’re the ones who’ve amazed me recently. Who amazes you?

Google voice has been rejected (and Eric Schmidt stepped down from the Apple board), Skype’s not available in all markets, some apps are being censored and Spotify’s app will not be allowed – although Apple does have a chance to prove me wrong on that last one. So as great as the Apple App store is, Apple’s worried about competition to it’s other services rather than working on making the device the best it could be. Spotify will get on the G-Phone, as will Google voice. They’ll probably get on the Pre as well. Maybe even on the Blackberry. So Apple’s missing a trick here.

Apple did a great job revolutionising the way the music industry participates in digital music, they make great hard ware and operating systems, I haven’t done the figures but my guess is the revenue Apple might lose on iTunes and with carriers and revenue shares would probably be made up in the hardware margins and revenues in that stream. Not only that but there’s nothing stopping Apple from building competitive apps, changing iTunes so that it can compete with Spotify on a subscription model. But alas Apple chooses to shut apps out. I know there are partners to consider, but it’s not like Apple hasn’t put their teeth into partners for the sake of user experience before.

Mike Arrington wasn’t the first to dump the iPhone and at this rate he won’t be the last. Closed doesn’t win. People want access and will move to something that is more open every time. Apple will get taken out by whatever competitor will be open enough to provide the best experience. It might take years but unless Apple doesn’t change gears it will happen.