April took just about as long to get through as March, and April’s Poll reveals some more information about the readers of this blog.
More than half of my readers (And that’s you because by definition – you are reading this blog right now) are quite mum on extra information in their profile, but as I was working my way through these results I realized I happen to share quite a bit about myself.
I’d make some quip about revealing things, but this is a professional blog and I don’t want anyone to get in trouble for reading the material here…
Email address
It may not come as a surprise, but of the people who reveal something about themselves, they all reveal their email address.
That is – because multiple responses were allowed, if someone checked any boxes other than “none of the above”, they certainly checked the box that says they reveal their email address.
(Unless people lied – and I would be quite shocked to learn that people lied when they take polls!)
Charts and such
So I’m breaking out the the mold on this post – the chart today is more of a visual effect. I’m sure some of you might care to weigh in on whether this improves or detracts from the post…-)
What extra information do you make available on your LinkedIn profile?
-
-
- ________XXXXXXXXX none of the above
- _________XXXXXXXX email address
_____________XXXX phone number
- ______________XXX birthday
________________X age
________________X home address
________________X marriage status
________________X race
________________X sex
_________________ political affiliation
_________________ religion
_________________ sexual orientation
-
So in addition to their email address, several include their phone number and birthday, and a few have other information about themselves.
My own revelations
At first I thought “I don’t reveal any of those things”, and in fact, I included a few categories like political affiliation to make sure that somebody wouldn’t check off all of them.
But let’s start with sex – If you can’t tell that Steve Tylock is a man from my name and picture, I’m going to suggest that something is terribly wrong. It is obvious. True – I didn’t check a box that says “I’m a man” – and have no interest in doing so, but that doesn’t mean you can’t tell.
Next – marital status and sexual orientation. Right there in my headline, it says “Husband, Father”. Now – Just as I mentioned above, I’m not checking a box off or anything, but that makes it reasonably plain, doesn’t it? I am making no comment on what I might believe about the topic, but I do identify with my own status.
About age – If you were to calculate my age based on graduating high school and then heading off for four years of an undergraduate education, you’d be reasonably accurate, and I definitely identify when I was the University of Buffalo. (And at this point, that’s a good thing as the University has received a reasonable bit of recognition around both its School of Management and Computer Science environment – that I spent much of my time at…)
When asked to identify myself with a race, I’m just as likely to check off “human” as any other, but if you wanted to classify me from the outside, you can clearly do so from the picture I provide on my profile…
And finally religion – you might think that you can tell from my headline, but I imagine you wouldn’t get it completely accurate. I absolutely identify myself as having faith – by stating that I am a Child of God. But which one? (And I say that merely to suggest that individuals on this planet tend to spend a lot of time suggesting that their religious practices are the one true and only connection to God, and it might be hard to consider that the same God could be at the end of the line for each of them…)
Thankfully, I don’t believe I reveal much if anything about my political affiliation, home address, birthday, phone number and most importantly of all my email address;-)
(But let’s remember – if you wanted to contact me by email, you should be able to find a way to do so within a few moments…)
Next up – can you access LinkedIn from work?
Let’s find out about policies at the place you call work – whether it’s a larger company, smaller company, or your own company – can you use LinkedIn when you’re there?
Check it out – just over to the right and up.
To your continued success,
steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock