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.

The issue is having control over technology. I have the TV on waaaaay too much. I accept that, it’s a hard habit to break, the Bee absolutely hates it and sometimes we get roped into watching a silly TV show rather than having a conversation. At the same time we both have iPod’s, blackberries and laptops – our house has two of everything and 4 laptops right now – so we spend a lot of time on devices. And this is likely to grow rather than stop.

We need to take back control. Just because we have Blackberry messenger, or skype, or email, or facebook, or twitter, or whatever doesn’t mean we need to be on it all the time. I’m a bit torn because I love watching TV with facebook or twitter on in the background, and I don’t think I want to give up the occasional sporting event or series that I’m really interested in. But it’s about balance; it’s about spending time wisely rather than wasting time.

Returning a piece of kit, or killing an account on a social network is not the answer, the answer is being conscious of how much time we’re spending with technology and what the opportunity costs are of that time.

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.

Small interactions can mean a significant amount to people. I’ve connected with a couple of people recently who made a little time for me and it meant a lot. I’m not sure if these people will remember me in the next couple of weeks but I sure as hell hope so. At first I was a bit taken back when I received Linkedin invites from a couple of people who’ve accomplished a lot but then I realized that this should work both ways. If there’s anyone I made time for who wants to stay in touch I should be open to them.

I also came across this piece on Mashable about Linkedin, a lot of it is pretty basic, but the one thing that stuck out to me was:

There are some on LinkedIn who believe you should only connect with a small percentage of professionals you know and trust. Others say (including myself) you should connect with everyone, even if you vaguely know them.

When looking for a job, you never know who will be able to recommend you, or who is looking for someone to fill a position where you would be a perfect fit.

That really hit a cord with me. Who knows who might be able to help me find a job or find the right person to fit a role in the coming months/years so I should be open to them I guess.

The one thing I won’t change is my stance on recommendations and introductions. I only recommend people that I truly would want to work with again. My connections are precious so introducing someone when I’m not totally sure about their value won’t really happen. So am I way off on my Linkedin philosophy?

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.

People forget that social media allows and moves people to share information and content easily. An ad that is actual a social interaction can be shared with a network fare more than a search query.

Let’s look at an example; I do a search for Virgin America, because I’m looking for a flight from NYC to San Francisco and I’m using twitter because I want to see if anyone’s had any experience on Virgin America flights, I see a “Promoted tweet” from Virgin America saying something like – “20% off of flights between Boulder and Las Vegas from us for the next 24 hours” now I’m not flying from Boulder to Vegas, but that’s a tweet I would send on (or ReTweet) to my network. All of a sudden that one promoted tweet impression has turned into nearly 1000 impressions as it goes to my network.

Let’s say I see a starbucks tweet that says that on the 15th you can bring in a mug and get a free coffee, if I bookmark that, or favourite it, that means that Starbucks has a richer bit of information and knows that I’m interested in their brand and their promotion.

Don’t get me wrong, this is assuming that brands are serious about social media and are actively engaging with the community. Brands need to offer real value and give something of benefits to the audience. The brands that pay attention and give people serious value are the ones who will be able to have their messages amplified.

For the brands who do it right, social is going to be huge for traffic acquisition because of the ability to amplify a message. That’s what all the pundits are missing in their analysis of promoted tweets. The ability to interact with the tweet and send it on to my network is huge. In the same way that building an application for facebook for a brand get’s into the news feed and gets users commenting and interacting with the brand in an amplified way.

Social media does acquisition and engagement in a way that search can’t. And that’s why I totally believe that social media will only get bigger and better as a source of costumers for companies that are smart enough to use it well.

Leave it to those crazy French Canadians to try an experiment like getting all your news from social media for five days (coverage from the Guardian and The Toronto Star). The problem with this experiment is that Social media as a tool depends on your connections. More so today than ever before, who you friend and follow is really important to how successful you’ll be using social media for anything.

Recently, Facebook launched customised news channels, where you can friend and follow CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times and other outlets, as well as individual contributors like Katie Couric and CNBC’s Nicole Lapin.

If you’re following CNN, the Guardian, BBC news and other news outlets on Twitter I think you’re likely to be pretty informed. But it all depends on who you follow! If you’re not connected, not following, not friending then don’t rely on the medium for your news.

The same goes with any task oriented participation through social media. If you want to get a job through twitter, follow people in HR, conduct searches for words like “job” “hiring” etc. Use Linkedin for the job hunt and you should be okay using just social media for leads (I’d never just use any one medium for a task like this, but that doesn’t change the fact that you could do it pretty successfully).

The lesson is social media can be good for almost anything, but if you don’t participate and commit, it’s likely to be good for nothing. It’s a tool, and like any tool it’s only as good as the person wielding it.

Tech Crunch UK Europe (sorry Mike) has a post up about Spartoo.com raising 12M Euros today, calling the company the “Zappos of Europe”, sure Zappos and Spartoo both sell shoes, have an s and a p in their name, but I’m not sure if Spartoo could really classify as a Zappos.

Here’s why, Zappos has a phenomenal culture and has bread a cult like following with it’s customers and partners. I’m neither of these and they still sent me a Zappos culture book for 2010 where every employee has written a paragraph or more about Zappos culture. Zappos will return your purchase and will make it a pretty good experience. I personally don’t know if Spartoo does this well – anyone?

I don’t believe that Zappos bottom line was the reason they were purchased, I believe Amazon wanted to learn and leverage the Zappos attitude to it’s customers and employees and it’s approach to social media. I think Zappos will teach Amazon a lot about customer service, and Amazon will teach Zappos a lot about costs and distribution.

The real learning might even be on international operations, and if that’s the case and Amazon helps bring Zappos to Europe and the rest of the world, I wouldn’t want to be Spartoo.

First the obvious, the continued explosion of social media – This whole post is a great excuse to highlight the fact that Rage Against the Machine is the Xmas number one in the UK. A purely grassroots social media campaign got the song – which is over 15 years old – to the top spot. Regardless of what you think of the song, you gotta love the fact that a Facebook and Twitter campaign toppled the machine (get it, rage against the…) that is the x-factor. People trump marketing dollars in this instance. I think more and more companies are going to spend less and get more mavens, influencers on board to promote goods and services, 2010 is the year where marketing dollars seriously move from the traditional to the emerging social channels. An example is the news today that the Economist is going to try and acquire over 500K in facebook fans and 750K in twitter users.

Secondly the less obvious but pretty transparent and related to the first, the continued explosion of local – small is the new big. Being small, being nimble, being flexible is going to win. Big brands are going to lose more and more market share to the little guy. As Gary Vaynerchuk likes to say, “small town rules”, where the internet allows smaller companies to compete. More small guys are going to leverage social and other channels to acquire costumers at the expense of the big guys.

Thirdly, the wild/out there, based on a hunch – Newspapers will fold their print publications. I’d like to see a couple of major newspapers move from a mix of print and online to being purely online. Physical newspapers are costly, not only in manufacturing but also in terms of distribution and other costs. I think we’re going to see some news brands move to less copies (if not none) and more online news distribution as their major means of revenues.

Fourthly, I think we’ll see the return of the IPO. Linkedin or Facebook are my bet for this one. I think one of these companies will get going on their move to an IPO in 2010.

Lastly, the big dream, I believe there will be a lot of good happening in 2010. I think we’ll get closer on the climate change exchange, maybe not a legally binding agreement, but there will be a serious agreement on climate control. I think politics will move in the right direction. I think the US President Obama will have a much better second year than his first. I think he’s inherited and had to deal with some serious challenges and we’re going to see 2010 where the US, and it’s administration, gets over the crap from 2009 and starts really performing.

Not sure which of these predictions will come true and which ones are going to fall flat, but I would totally trade all four of the first ones for the last. Any out there have any predictions for 2010?

Yesterday, Friendfeed announced that it had been acquired by Facebook. For both of these companies it makes sense, facebook is trying (almost to their detriment) to compete with Twitter and Friendfeed does have real time search and some great engineering talent. Buying Friendfeed helps facebook and gives the friendfeed folks a nice exit. Personally, I think facebook will open up status and content to people to search wider then just your friends circle, this could open up a nice alternative revenue stream for Facebook.

Dave McClure thought otherwise, and thought that Google shouldn’t have let this happen. Dave’s a really smart guy, who’s blog and presentations I read frequently and quote often, and I have a tonne of his stuff bookmarked on delicious (his start up metrics guide should be required viewing for all). So it was hard to disagree. I think Dave’s probably right (purely on odds if not on logic) so I wanted to make my point and invite him to disagree with more then 140 characters.

Dave said (redacted for the audience which might be sensitive):

“How the F*** does Google let Facebook acquire FriendFeed for any amt of $? GOOGLE U R A BIG F****** LOSER. Absolute #FAIL.”

I wasn’t the only one who disagreed with Dave on this, and we went back and forth a couple of times. He also discussed it with some VCs, one of which, Manu Kumar put it best:

“@davemcclure FF a better fit for FB than $GOOG imho. Also doubt the ex-googlers wd want to return to the mothership. #UnknownMoreAttractive”

That was my thinking as well, why would you want to go back to a company you left in the first place? But let’s explore this from Google’s perspective. Google probably has more users of Orkut then there are users of friendfeed and by a lot of accounts Orkut’s not as nice a product. Google is playing with communication using Google Wave. Google has strong search capabilities. Google has really smart engineering talent. As Fred Wilson might say, they’re doubling down on what they know and can do really well. So why would Goog want to buy Friendfeed? As a defensive manoeuvre? “We’ll buy it so you can’t”, good luck with that.

I’m glad friendfeed got bought by facebook, as a facebook user I’m interested to see what innovation comes out of this acquisition, as a user I’m also glad that Google didn’t buy friendfeed, it’s creating great innovation in more than just one company.

This brings me back to the sports analogy. For Facebook the buy is offense, but for Google buying Friendfeed would have been defence. I believe companies need to be mostly offensive with a dose of good defence. Sure defense wins championships (Celtics last year in the NBA) but like the Oilers of the 80s, most of the Larry bird and Magic years of the 80s and the Bulls of the 90s, great offences build dynasties.

Update: Dave’s calmed down a bit.