And I mean this in the nicest way – if the former candidate for Vice President can end up with two profiles on LinkedIn, what chance do you have of avoiding the same fate?
A whole lot – because you’re reading this blog!-)
But seriously folks, let’s have a look…
Vice Presidential candidate
This one appeared a while back, and still talks about the campaign:
And for a political presence on the site, it’s not bad.
Viewers of the profile should not expect that Palin herself had created the content though. When you get to that stage, there’s people that do that. (Other politicians and celebrities have pages and that’s just what a reader should expect…)
Ex-Governor Palin
And this one appeared later on:
And this one is “more active” in that the Governor position has been updated with the end date of June 2009 when she resigned.
My longtime readers will now be thinking things like – hey – there’s no “Summary”, “Specialties”, or “descriptive text” for any of those positions. The profile’s “Headline” is her name, there are no recommendations, and no hint of a “personal brand” comes through. It absolutely ignores all the advice I give…
New job, new profile
I don’t specifically deal with this in The LinkedIn Personal Trainer, so I thought I’d call it out here.
If you get a new job, you do not create a new profile!
There – that’s it – when you get a new job, you edit the old job to add an end date, and create a new job within the same profile.
Set your primary address as your personal email account
And I’ve also talked about directing your LinkedIn email to your own personal email account – that way if you change jobs, you’re not left trying to access the LinkedIn account when it is sending everything to your old employer…
I’m reasonably certain this is why Palin doesn’t have access to the old account – if she never actually worked on the site, she never had access to the password, and the email went somewhere else. So if she tries to reset the password, the email doesn’t come to her, and she’s out of luck.
Search for yourself
Besides the entertainment value of a high profile individual getting into an awkward situation, let me give you some practical advice:
Search for yourself by name on LinkedIn right now
And if you find out that you’ve created a duplicate account by mistake, take the steps to deal with it.
Getting LinkedIn customer support involved
My advice to Palin would be to involve LinkedIn customer support to reclaim that old profile and at the very least have it removed. She can probably scrape the text off it and add details to her newer profile…
And because I don’t work for LinkedIn, I have no great revelations on doing this – I hear it requires patience and persistence;-)
To your continued success,
steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock
I use LinkedIn a lot in my business development work and I see quite a few people with two LinkedIn profiles. When it’s someone I know, I call it to their attention. They usually say they knew there were two, and just hadn’t gotten around to deleting one of them.
Dan,
In any training session I can usually find an individual or three with duplicate profiles… That’s why I’m always reminding people how to avoid it, and as in this post – that they should check.
The doppelganger profile is often embarrassing to them…
steve