I’m just back from our 2011 23rd Annual Meeting in Lisbon, and I’ll have lots to share with you over the next week or so.  But what’s fresh in my mind this morning is our session on LinkedIn from Saturday morning – I’d like to share some best practices for LinkedIn, which can be particularly useful when you’re just returning from any conference:

• Review the attendee list, or the stack of business cards you returned with and make note of the people you met and chatted to at the conference. Search for, and connect to, these people on LinkedIn, making sure to send a personal note with your invitation that refers to your conversations.
   
• Set your browser to open to the LinkedIn home page when you start it up.  I use Chrome on my desktop, and have set it to open several tabs when I start it up each morning, including LinkedIn – that way I never have to remember to visit LinkedIn and check the latest status updates.  Then, each morning, I scroll through my news feed and comment on or like updates and news, or connect to anyone I might know.  It doesn’t take a lot of time, and it keeps me plugged into what my network is doing.

• Whenever you have a big case win, news from your firm, award, honor, post it to your status update – it is essential to interact with others and be "social" when you’re using social networking tools, but you can also toot your own horn a little bit and share what you’re up to.
   
• When participating in a group, sign up to receive a weekly digest email of the group’s activities – that way you don’t have to remember to sign in and look at the group.  You can just scan the email digest quickly for discussions of interest, and then log in if you want to comment.
   
• Have a complete profile – LinkedIn will tell you on your "edit profile" page what percentage complete your profile is.  It’s important to give people a complete picture of who you are, so having a photo, job headline, and relevant work experience is, at the minimum, a must.
   
• Use LinkedIn on your mobile phone – LinkedIn has apps for iPhone, BlackBerry, Droid and Palm.
   
• Follow company news feeds – for lawyers, you will want to follow the news feeds for your clients and potential clients, which will keep you up-to-date on their latest news.  For marketers, you may want to also include the feeds for your competitors.

   

• Use JD Supra and include their application in your profile to share news with your connections.

Does anyone have any best practices they’d like to add? I know there are a lot of busy lawyers out there, but if you put in a little initial time investment, LinkedIn will do a lot of networking work for you!