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.

There’s a parallel here with basketball, lot’s of free agents in the NBA this year are figuring out where they want to play next year. It’s interesting to watch as a fan because you’ll see if players value winning, they’ll go to a team that is set up to win or can get other free agents and become successful, or if they value making maximum dollars.

Knowing why you do something is really important to doing it right / well. When I graduated from B school, I focused on the commute, focused on the location and the brand of the company I wanted to join and that meant a big US company, so I applied for and got a job at one. It looked great on paper and on Linkedin but I wasn’t really happy. I didn’t have the “why” right. Now I know I want to create something, make a difference, create some jobs, and build something that makes an impact, so I know the “why” and I’m much happier professionally.

Don’t get me wrong, there are basic needs like a salary or the availability of a job in a location, but aside from the life basics I think real happiness comes from knowing why you’re doing something. So before you take on the next job, move to a different place or whatever it is you do, make sure you know why you’re doing it.

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.

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.

3. Why set up your start-up in the UK? Especially in the current environment of higher taxes (VAT, capital gains, etc) and reduced government spending?

Here’s something controversial for you, I don’t mind paying taxes. Especially for things like education and health care. As someone who grew up with a single mom who worked very hard, I had to take on a huge debt to go to University and then graduate school so I appreciate everything the state does and if that means that I take a little bit less home so be it.

At the same time London is one of the most active entrepreneurship and digital centres so anytime you can get a mix like that you’d be mad not to take advantage of it.

The capital gains tax hits entrepreneurs and investors hard, but I do believe the government won’t take it higher than 40% which is what it was a couple of years ago. Hopefully, the government will include some breaks and exemptions for entrepreneurship.

Right now you have to be where your market is and where you can build a business, if you get to a point where you’re worrying about how much of your profits are being taken by taxation you’re going in the right direction. For me, the amount of connections, meetings, clients, advisors, investors you have in the UK and especially in London is phenomenal. People always talk about Silicon Valley and that’s great if you’re a tech company, but in places like London and New York you’re closer to the real world, where most people look at you funny when you say you “tweet”.

More on the Nestoria blog

“1. the marginal cost of a newspaper is zero. 2. there is perfect competition. conclusion? zero industry profit, paywalls or not.”

I’m sure I’ve written about the eventual doom in the newspaper industry as well but no one ever talks about how they could make it work and what would need to be done. Don’t get this twisted, I don’t think pay walls are a good idea, but I do think they could, repeat COULD, work if done right.

So here are my thoughts, I believe there are three principles to make payment for news content work:

1 – offer superb editorial/analysis/content that is unavailable elsewhere
2 – keep it cheap and painless to pay
3 – Consistency across competitors

First, pay walls work when you have superb analysis or original great content like the WSJ or the FT. Where people aren’t paying for the “news” they’re paying to read commentary and gain insights. It works for people like the economist and monocle for content creators with a large, affluent readership. If you don’t have content that is killer odds are you’ll put up a pay wall and users will go elsewhere.

The other element that could help a pay wall succeed is making it dirt easy to purchase. Think of iTunes, how easy is it to buy music on iTunes? How easy is it to do a purchase on Amazon. One click and you can purchase. For a pay wall to succeed you’ll need to make it super easy to for users to pay. Make it even a little complicated and the users are off. iTunes might be more expensive than some other 3rd party websites, but the fact that you can make the purchase easily means I save time from interactive with the complex shopping basket functionality that you see on other sites.

Lastly, if you don’t have specialist content you better make sure that your competitors are not close enough to you in terms of content and aren’t giving the content away for free. In the UK the BBC is likely to always give content away as long as that’s the case it will be difficult for anyone to really put up a viable pay wall. To really make it work you need consistent pricing policies but most people would call this collusion. So if you’re a news media company don’t bank on this third principle.

The Irish News really failed across the board, they didn’t provide great analysis and content that was original, they didn’t make it easy to subscribe and their price point was all over the place. So to make it succeed, focus on creating great content, providing analysis and features that people value and making it dead simple to purchase and don’t price it at a point where it becomes a competitive disadvantage and pay walls might, I repeat MIGHT, have a shot.

Don’t get it twisted, I really like Google and respect the Android OS, I love Apple and love working on a Mac and am itching to come up with a reason to get an iPad. But I’m pretty stuck on the blackberry.

Why? Simple. Blackberry does one thing really really well. The Blackberry messenger (BBM) feature is whole heap of awesomeness. A lot of my friends are on crackberries and the fact that we can message internationally in groups for free wherever we are has a whole lot of other people hooked. Not to mention university students who love to use the BBM with their friends and family across the world.

Sure Blackberry does a whole lot of other stuff well, emailing with a proper physical keyboard is nice, and for business email management it’s a great service. But for me it’s BBM that keeps me as well as a lot of other people hooked. So much so that the Blackberry still outsells the iPhone and Android handsets in most markets – in the US last quarter, iPhones had 21%, Androids 28% and RIM 36% of all smart phone sales.

The lesson here is to do one thing really really well. Most companies that are really successful do one thing absolutely, phenomenally well. Google does search really really well, this gives them license to develop and build other great things like maps and mail. Facebook makes it simple to share stuff really well, it’s not the best picture sharing sight, it’s not the best for updates or events, but because it does sharing this content really well it enables them to do events and photos etc and get traction in these other areas.

So when starting something, make sure you have one feature that’s absolutely fabulous that makes it difficult to compete with and this will help grow and maintain your market share.

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?