Tips For Taking A LinkedIn Profile Photo

Tips For Taking A LinkedIn Profile Photo

A good headshot on LinkedIn is important for your profile. Users with photos receive 21x more views than profiles without, and are 36x more likely to receive messages. A “professional” photo increases those chances even further.  But you don’t need to pay a professional photographer to have a “professional” looking photo.  We’re going to provide some tips for getting a good photo. The good news is that smart phone cameras are perfectly capable of capturing and editing a high quality photo for your LinkedIn profile. While you will probably get better results if you have a friend or family member take the photo, you can also achieve good results with a selfie.  Either way, here are some considerations: Look your best: pick out a professional outfit that is aligned with the role and industry you are targeting. Look at the profiles of people with that role/industry and see how they are dressed. IE Bankers are buttoned up with a suit and tie, or blouse and blazer, product managers in tech are probably going to be more casual, think collared shirt, no tie. Take care of your personal grooming, hair (including facial hair for men), makeup, jewelry, etc… Make eye contact with the camera and remember to smile! This is another reason having someone else take your photo will likely yield better results, a friend can make you smile and capture multiple shots in a row to capture that perfect moment, and you will be looking at the lens, not your own image on the screen. Setting, background, lighting: find a place to take your photo where the background is...

Podcasts I’m Listening To (Summer 2020 Edition)

When the topic of podcasts comes up, the next question is always, “What do you listen to?” and since my listening habits change regularly, I figured it was long past time to update my current heavy rotation. News and Current Events Seattle NowUp FirstConsider ThisNPR Politics PodcastMarketplace TechShortwave Long Form Interview and Though The Ezra Klein ShowTen Percent HappierThe Science of Happiness Business and Industry Planet MoneyThe Indicator from Planet MoneyHBR IdeacastHBR Women at WorkHBR After HoursMasters In BusinessPrimedWorkLife with Adam GrantThink Fast, Talk Smart Kids and Stories I listen to alot of podcasts with my son, some of them include Myths and LegendsStories PodcastCircle RoundMystery RecipeTumble ScienceBrains OnForever AgoTreasure Island...

My Podcast Recommendations #trypod

In the spirit of #trypod, the industry promotion to get more people to listen to podcasts, here are my recommendations.  I will group them into two loose categories, 1) news and information, 2) entertainment News & Information Planet Money (NPR) – I’ve been listening since the beginning. About the economy and business. NPR Politics (NPR) Freakonomic Radio (NPR/WNYC) Entertainment Think again from Big Think – thought leaders James Altuscher Show – interesting guests and he is a good interviewer Startup (Gimlet) – deep info-tainment reporting on startups  (not a “news” program, they go deep into a startupeach season while also chronicling their own startup experience) Reply All (Gimlet) funny, a show “about the internet” Hidden Brain (NPR) – you’ve probably heard segments on NPR, interesting stories about human nature and brain science Pivot Podcast – the author of Pivot, Jenny Blake. Some good episodes, but sometimes they are a bit long winded How I built this (NPR) feature length interviews with people who have created things (like companies, just listened to the episode about the founder of southwest) Twice Removed (gimlet) a show by AJ Jacobs that delves into geneology The Eater Upsell – about the food/restaurant industry Invisibilia   The podcasts I listen to fall into two other categories: 1) those i listen to every episode of, and 2) those I listen to sporadically. I listen to nearly every episode of Planet Money, Hidden Brain, Reply All, StartUp.  All the others, I pick and choose, or used to listen to each episode and am now more selective, or have just started listening to and am not sure that I will listen...

On Translating Really Big Numbers and Giving Them a Human Context

I am pretty big into data visualization right now: how can communicators help people understand data with charts or pictures. It’s all the rage. But communicators still need to think about how to contextualize really big numbers with words that evoke images. In disaster reporting you often hear things like, “The wildfires burned an area larger than the state of Rhode Island!” or “The oil spill could fill 1000 olympic swimming pools.” (I’m not suggesting that either of these are very good examples, they are basically stand-ins for saying “really big” because the writer or speaker is completely convinced of the innumeracy of his audience. Today I encountered an article about a topic that interests me, food waste. I didn’t get too far into it before my mind (and fingers) were off on a tangent. Here is the second sentence: To give you an idea of how much 3,000 tons is, that’s the weight of the new warship USS Little Rock, set to be commissioned later this year. Do you know how big a warship is? I don’t. Do you want to click through just to find out? I don’t.  Using an analogy to help the reader understand a quantifiable measure only really helps when the analogous thing is something your audience knows about. Otherwise it just means, “really big”. So here are a few better ways to quantify 3,000 tons: 1 ton is 2,000 pounds, so 3,000 tons is 6 Million pounds. We all know how much we weigh, and have a sense of a pound of food, we often buy food by weight. If it were all...

Shrink that giant Powerpoint file

We’ve all probably run into this at one point or other: you’ve created a visually stunning Powerpoint deck, but the file is absolutely huge! You can’t email it, or it just takes forever to open or save it… well there is a solution: In PPT for Windows, file > save as — tools, look for “Reduce file size“ In PPT for Mac, file > reduce file size This will shrink the total size of your Powerpoint file by optimizing the images you’ve...