Have you ever come across LinkedIn profiles of people that have something fascinating or potentially useful in the future? The problem is, you don’t know the person enough to send him/her an invitation to connect, and you don’t want to interrupt your workflow to send him/her a message. LinkedIn doesn’t have a built-in function to “save” or “flag” profiles for future reference.
Ah, but there’s a wonderful hack I’ve used for months that’s very easy, effective and free. My thanks to Jack Jackson, who posted this question on LinkedIn Answers today, making me realize that my workaround could be helpful to many other people. Read on for the step-by-step rundown.
Flagging LinkedIn Profiles for the Future, Step by Step
To save LinkedIn member profiles for future reference, you can use del.icio.us; it’s a perfect workaround for this situation.
- I use del.icio.us to bookmark people’s profiles, so I can follow up with them later. I see a lot of possibility in some aspect of the person’s profile, but I’m not ready to reach out to connect with the person yet. Skip to step 2 if you already know how to use del.icio.us.
- Go to del.icio.us and open an account, which involves 3 simple steps: first, you’ll create a username, etc., and make sure to respond to the confirm email.
- del.icio.us will prompt you to add 2 buttons to your browser bar: “my del.icio.us” and “post to del.icio.us.”
- The first one takes you to your del.icio.us home page, where all your saved bookmarks are. The second one you use to bookmark pages (add bookmarks to your del.icio.us account). Test these by bookmarking a couple of web pages and tagging them. At this point, you are up and running on del.icio.us. If I haven’t explained well enough, please see the link at the end of this post.
When you see a LinkedIn profile you want to save, hit the “post to del.icio.us” button, which takes you to your del.icio.us home page. I save these profiles with 3 types of tags:
- Subject, whatever interests me about the person (i.e. “India” “social network” “investment bank” “social bookmarking” “supply chain“… )
- “LinkedIn”
- A unique tag I create called “wannaknow.” I also make the bookmark private, so no one can see it except me.
- I can find these people at any time. Search “your bookmarks” (not all of del.icio.us, which is the default) in del.icio.us for the “wannaknow” and “LinkedIn” tags. The wannaknow people also appear when I’m searching my own bookmarks for subject tags.
Please let me know how this works for you or if you have another system. Here are two other references that might help:
- del.icio.us’s help page explains the above process in more detail than I did above
- Everything You Wanted to Know About Web 2.0*: Social Tagging
Other Points
I like the Web 2.0 way of putting things “in the cloud” (in this case, using del.icio.us) better than saving the URLs (of the profile pages) in a text file or word document locally (on my computer) because then it’s accessible via iPhone, Blackberry, Palm or other computer. It’s also easier to search.
I’ve used this process for months now, and it’s awesome because it’s a way to file people you want to engage but don’t want to ask them to connect yet.
Chris,
There are two additional options available within LinkedIn that would work.
1. The BookMark: You have to have the IE toolbar to do so but you can bookmark it
2. The second option is to download the profile as a pdf and save on a LinkedIn folder you create
On the person’s profile page above their name are four icons, two of which accomplish the above.
Sean
My LinkedIn blog is at http://www.benefitsroi.com/LinkedIn
Sean, thanks for these; I don’t use the IE toolbar, so I didn’t know about that one. How does bookmarking with the IE toolbar add value beyond bookmarking in your browser?
BTW, I should add that Jack Jackson’s favorite (“best”) answer was keeping the URLs in a word file. The venerable “local” approach shouldn’t be overlooked, although the minute you access your LI from multiple devices as I do, it becomes less viable.
Cheers-