I tried to log in to my LinkedIn account as I do every day and to my surprise I read “Your LinkedIn Profile Has Been Suspended”.  Oh my god!

My account, my contacts, my groups, my business and my marketing are all suspended.  Yes, I do a lot of business on LinkedIn and use it every single day. How what?  What happened? Did I do something wrong? Can this happen to you? YES!

Immediately I visited the FAQ in LinkedIn and under “suspended accounts” I read every single question and answer.  No, I did not send unrequested emails or invitations, no, I did not spam, no, I did not do anything wrong.  What happened?

After reading the FAQ portion I quickly submitted an email through the web form in the suspended account section of the professional social network.  I waited 2 days and nothing.  No account and no response.  Now I visited the social network again and read all pertinent information I could find.  Finally, I found a customer service email.  I quickly send an email explaining my situation and asking for clarification, an explanation or any response.  Even apologizing for whatever unintentionally I could have done to merit a suspended account.

Next day I received a response and my account was activated.   What happened? 

New Rule!  You may only use the “First Name” and “Last Name” section of your LinkedIn profile for your first name and last name.  You can’t add anything else.  What does this mean?  Well, as a marketing tool I wrote clever messages after my last name on my profile. This is a marketing headline strategy to get more attention, more click-troughs and more exposure.  This is what I had:

Jorge Olson - Just Published a Beverage Book

When you do a search on the site for “beverage”, or “book” my name always came up. Furthermore when someone invited me to join their network or just browned my name they would know I just published a beverage book.  I did this by simply going into my profile and writing the text after my last name.  Now LinkedIn does not permit any messages at all; just your name. 

How can this affect you? Simple, you can’t use this strategy anymore. It also affects “open networkers”, the people who accept all invitations and want to expand their network as they can’t announce they are open networkers anymore. May people belong to groups like LION or TopLinked and other groups of open networkers who require you write their name after you last name; you can’t do it anymore.  Many more of you might write your email after your name to invite people to network, remove it.  These are some of the common uses of your profile name that are being cracked down:

Jorge Olson - jorge@ jorgeolson.com

Jorge Olson - LION

Jorge Olson - TopLinked

Jorge Olson - Phone: (619) 852 6942

Jorge Olson - Any marketing message

If you have something after your last name remove it today before you get a surprise next time you log in to your profile.

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Have you ever seen “I’m an open networker” and wondered “what is that?” Especially after you see it 5, 10, even 20 times on LinkedIn.

So what is the big deal with open networkers? What is an open networker?

An open network on LinkedIn or any other social network is someone that is willing to accept your invitation if you send one. Yes, even if they don’t know you and or know someone you know they will accept your invitation.

Why would anyone accept all invitation?

If you accept all invitations and are an open network you want to grow your network as fast as possible. Many people really don’t understand why you should expand your network in this way and I’ve received many emails asking “why should anyone accept people in their network if they don’t know them”.

Expanding your network is not difficult and I think not the real question. The real question is “what can you do with your network once you have 7,000 in it?”

I spoke with 5 people last week that have more than 3,000 and don’t know what to do next. This is s typical problem, it is one thing to accept all invitations and expand your network and it is another to leverage them.

If you are not super marketing savvy chances are you don’t have a funnel to point your network. You don’t have a blog, or a newsletter or a way to get people from your linkedin.com network to your own private network.

What is the key? They key is value! The key is “Unselfish Promotion”. If you add value to your network you will easily get them to subscribe to your blogs or newsletters and down the line offer you a job, or buy your products or whatever you are promoting.

Some important advice, adding value does not mean telling people about your great products or letting them know about what incredible features and benefits your products carry. That’s advertising, not unselfish promotion.

You need to create value with real, usable, free information and yes, at the end feel free to plug your website, job, product or company.

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Like many people, I was not quick to join LinkedIn. As a matter of fact one of my friends invited me and it took me 2 months to accept his invitation and join. I was thinking: “Not another time wasting social network”.When I finally joined the network I added people from my outlook and found that several of them where already on the network, a total of 30. I thought, “Cool, I know some people here” so I added them to my network on LinkedIn. After that I joined 4 different groups that where of interest to me including one on venture capital, one on marketing, another for book authors and the last one on keynote speaking.

Now I was on LinkedIn and had my 30 connections, my 4 groups and I thought I was done. Then I asked myself: “What next?” I already know the 30 people I added to the network I don’t need them to contact them. So what’s the value of this? What’s the difference between this and Facebook, or MySpace, or Hi5? What’s the buzz on LinkedIn?

For months I did nothing, thinking this was a place to socialize with people you already know. One day I was looking on Google the keywords “Venture Capital” as I was advising one of my customers get some funding. I then visited LinkedIn and logged in. Then I did a search on Venture Capital once more. Wow, 50,000 + came up. Quickly I noticed that these where not just company names, I was getting the name and many times email and phone number of actual people, with photo, title, interests, hobbies, all what you would wish for.

The downside of my Venture Capital search is that none of them where connected to me directly so I could not contact them as in LinkedIn it is considered Spam. Nevertheless I started to understand the value of this network. Imagine if of these 50,000 I could have a few hundred connected to me directly. I could call them and ask for advice. I could email them and see if they are interested in my project or ask them to point me in the right direction. Now the task was connecting to them.

I did have some connections at a 3rd level. This means that I know someone that knows someone that knew lot’s of people in Venture Capital. This one person was my friend Gustavo. Gustavo is a programmer and one of his customers is a Venture Capitalists. That one person connected me with 300 people at a third level. If I really wanted to speak with one of those 300 people I could ask Gustavo for an introduction through his customer; but that was not my idea, I did not want just one connection, I wanted hundreds, or thousands.

I played more with the software and did more targeted searches by clicking on “Advanced Search”. I searched by zip code to see the closest contacts to me and therefore the ones I could contact in person. I also searched for keywords like “beverage” and “consumer goods” as the company I was working with was a beverage company. For every search I got great contacts. I thought this could turn out to be my very own private rolodex.

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