LinkedIn Endorsements Are The New Mini-Recommendations
Categories: LinkedIn, Social Media
Thank you all for your questions about those “Endorsements” on LinkedIn that have popped up in the last little while.
A while ago LinkedIn started to ask us to add skills to our profiles. At first I figured that this was to highlight keywords I want to be found by. While this is still one of the main functions you will have noticed that we can now endorse our contacts by skill.
I called up my friend Colin Parker from Red Giraffe Strategic Sales and Marketing to get his expert opinion on this.
You can watch the very interesting video right here (5 minutes):
Endorsements offer a quick and easy way to recommend someone for their skills. I agree with Colin that it is important to keep your Endorsements to the skills the person has actually demonstrated to you.
But endorsements won’t replace recommendations -
- because a recommendation actually has a name attached to it.
- because a recommendation gives the opportunity to elaborate on the way you experienced the person you are recommending.
If you didn’t tell LinkedIn what skills you wanted to be endorsed for, the algorithm will find some in your profile for you. So in order to take full advantage of this new option you should edit the skills people can endorse you for.
Go to “Edit Profile” > scroll to “Skills and Expertise” and click “Edit”
As Colin points out, the best etiquette for using endorsements would be to reciprocate but only endorse skills you really know the person has.
I particularly like his suggestion to seek out those LinkedIn contacts that you look up to and endorse them for the skills you admire them for.
What skills do you want to be endorsed for?
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I’m not so sure about this.
Don’t you think the mechanism through which people can “endorse” you as devaluing to the endorsement itself?
It’s very easy to vote for someone hoping they’ll vote you back on your skills
It’s too easy to sit and click away at what people have placed as their skills
It’s much easier than having to sit down and write a coherent paragraph of words
….and Im sure there are a lot more ‘much easier than…’ examples!
All in all, Im not looking at the skills endorsements as anything other than a voting frenzy.
Thanks for your comment Jon!
(dofollow)
I think in the time since the post was written your observations was confirmed by the way the tool is used. My/our hope that users would use it wisely did not come true. Hopefully we will see a new culture of meaningful recommendations soon.
Frithjof recently posted..My Favourite Social Media Blog Posts In The First Week Of 2013