“The ability to reorder the sections on your profile is just the first of a huge number of enhancements that are coming to your LinkedIn profile in the upcoming months”, says Aaron Bronzan on the LinkedIn Blog.

I played around with the ability to move sections of my LinkedIn profile and it seemed pretty easy to customize your profile to suit your needs. That being said, I did notice that moving things around goofed up my Twitter feed, which then took me a couple of tries to get it back working again. Experiment with the changes…it definitely gives you the ability to personalize your brand.

WOW – LinkedIn has been quietly testing changes to their overall design and are now in the process of rolling out the new design to all of their users. If you don’t see the change yet, you will sometime in the next week.

Some of the changes to the new design include:

• No persistent left-hand navigation. All global navigation is in the top navigation bar. LinkedIn wanted to free up space for page content – that means you can include more information about your and your network.
• New global navigation bar takes up less vertical space. Page content is moved up higher on the page – less scrolling!
• Drop down menus provide quick and easy access to popular LinkedIn features
• Additional applications and services are available under the “more” menu.

Learn more about what’s coming at the LinkedIn blog.

Resident Talent Builders tech advisor, Mark Moore turned me on to Toodledo, an online tool to help me better manage my goals and priorities. It was time. As much as I love and use technology myself, I had not transitioned from my old habit of writing to do items in my Franklin Covey binder. I started realizing that the manual approach wasn’t working for me anymore.

A bit of a routine for me each morning is to let the dogs outside, pour a great cup of coffee, light the candles and grab my journal and day timer to plan for my day. While it is quiet, and my mind is fresh, I like to think about my goals and focus priorities for the day and week. I’d jot down things that needed to be done. But then I started noticing that when I went up to my office to work, my day timer sat there quietly, closed and unused on my desk. If my memory was working well, I probably knocked a few important things off the list. I’m quite certain though, that I missed some things that may have moved me closer to my goals more quickly.

I needed a better way!

I was on a rant recently about how I’d heard motivational speaker, Verl Workman talk about the critical steps to time and life mastery. The one that really caught my attention is the suggestion that all priorities are scheduled electronically. Then you stick to your priorities ruthlessly.

Why electronically? We will miss a deadline for a to do item at some point in our life, but we’ll still want to keep it on the list to ensure that it is completed. Unless you remain disciplined to moving the handwritten items forward, you are bound to miss something. Mark happened to mention that he was using Toodledo, an online system for managing goals and to do items. It integrated with Outlook and had the required iPhone app, so off I went. I began using Toodledo about 2.5 weeks ago. Already I’m seeing my productivity shoot up. BTW, I’m a huge fan of Stephen Covey – always will be. And I’m aware that Franklin Covey offers an electronic planning system. I just never had much luck with it for some reason.

I have some very specific goals I plan to achieve. In my mind’s eye, I already have. Using Toodledo is giving me the focus and organizational tools I need to stay on track. I Toodledo - do you?

Think again…this is a revolution that continues to grow.

Social bookmarking is a popular part of the social media movement. For the tech dweebs that is:) I say that lovingly of course, because I’m part dweeb myself. Though social bookmarking hasn’t quite caught on with the mainstream user, I’m confident that it will be soon. Most of the folks I meet are still grappling with what Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and LinkedIn are all about…but, hey, one thing at a time.

Even though I love technology, it took me a while to connect how I could use social bookmarking in a meaningful way. Once I got it though…it was like the parting of the Red Sea. The possibilities of how you can use social bookmarking as a customer retention tool are endless.

Whenever I speak on the topic of social media and social networking, I notice that people seem to be the most confused about how social bookmarking fits in. Even more confused than they are about Twitter, so that’s saying something. In Made to Stick, the Heath brothers talk about how to help people understand a concept that confuses them by tying it back to something that they can relate too. An analogy. In pretty simple terms, I tell people that social bookmarking is like having one gigantic, personal file cabinet on the Internet. You “tag” the web address of articles, video’s, blogs or websites that you like for easy reference later. Instead of file folders, you use an informal tagging system that lets you create categories that you’ll remember later on and can access quickly. AND…what I think is the coolest part of social bookmarking is that you can “share” your tags with others.

From a sales perspective, you could create categories that represent a particular clients’ interest. If for example, I’m your customer and you know that I love social media technologies (as everyone who knows me, knows that I do!), you would watch for interesting information that you would tag for Barb and share with me. I don’t have to rip an article out of Fortune Magazine and then send it to you manually with a personal note, although I still do a lot of that. Instead, I can tag articles that I think my clients and prospective buyers will find interesting and share them with everyone at once, or I can choose just to share with people in my private network. Either way…it’s a great connection point. Now, if you get your contacts to sign up and engaged in your bookmarking community, they can tag information that they then share with everyone in the community too. Very cool stuff indeed!

So, Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon are 3 of the biggies…each having a slightly unique twist to their approach, which I’ll cover in more detail in subsequent posts.

Stick around…you really do want to know about how to integrate the use of social bookmarking into your customer relationship management approach, because THIS IS a key way to not only provide value but to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Can you dig it?