What's the profile of your on-line profile? (Part 4)

Originally, I had envisioned that there would be 3 articles in this series, but today, Kevin Merritt, over at blist had a great post on Recommendation, Reputation and Opinion, and I could not resist adding a fourth post to this list.

Where this applies to your on-line profile is when you either make or accept a recommendation on LinkedIn or other social-networking sites.

One thing I like about Kevin's post is that the importance of detail regarding a personal brand is highly emphasized. Second, vague references degrade a personal brand. Third, the 'trust' component of your brand is always under construction.

As this relates to recommendations on your profile, think about the following:

• What is the message your reader gets when they read 10+ vague recommendations about you?
• What is being said when you have 'clumps', by date, of recommendations? (You solicited them at the time you left a company...).
• Are all recommendations the same, or is their greater weight to unsolicited recommendations? Can you tell the difference between the two when you read them? (If you can't, know that many recruiters can.)
• When someone reads recommendations you wrote, are they vague, or are they specific?  What does that say about you?
  
• Most important thing about a recommendation: Does it say 'I'd buy them again?'. I guarantee that a hiring manager's (honest) word that they'd hire someone again should be considered high praise.

Finally, know that nobody in this world gets great reviews from everyone. In the course of a career, there are bumps, there are people you will not get along with, and if you're doing things right, you're going to fail (or so says Tom Peters over and over, and here's a quote he uses from Churchill, "Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm").

I sense a future post...