I love fall. It is by far my favorite time of the year. Harvest happens now. My birthday is in the fall. The endless heat of summer actually ends. The bugs go away. It’s all good.
The video above is of a harvest of a different kind than we are familiar with in the midwest. This is the grape harvest in the Napa Valley, at a winery that bears my last name. These guys are doing it right – check out the other videos on their YouTube list (especially the one describing biodynamic practices). Very cool. I’m no wine conniseur but this is some very good wine, highly regarded and quite popular in the restaurant trade. If you’re up for something nice, pick up a bottle at www.ehlersestate.com.
My favorite social networking tool by far is LinkedIn. I like it because it provides large returns for my efforts, it lacks the “juvenile” features of other networks, and it really does work if you work it. I use it daily, and it is slowly replacing email as my regular, go-to app. I wanted to post up a few handy tips for my growing collection of newly “LinkedIn” friends who read this regularly.
Straight from the horse’s mouth
Below is a video produced by the helpful folks at LinkedIn to help newcomers understand the whole bit a little better.
Next, I wanted to recommend one of Chris Brogan’s many excellent posts that discuss LinkedIn and making your LinkedIn profile work for you. He gives specific tips on making the profile that is displayed publicly much more functional for both employees and freelancers. There is much more useful info on a host of social media topics at http://www.chrisbrogan.com, as well.
A Related Note
While reading and commenting on a post on Chris Brogan’s blog, I met the guest author, Becky McCray and she ultimately asked me to write a guest post for her own blog, Small Biz Survival. She suggested discussing how LinkedIn can work for small town professionals. The resulting five tips were published last month on http://smallbizsurvival.com (thanks for the opportunity Becky!).
So did you guess the secret to the video clip that I posted earlier? Well here it is: the snowboarder is none other than my boss. That’s right, I work for that guy carving up the powder!
He is energetic and brilliant in his field of herbal medicine, well respected by his colleagues and something of a legend among his peers in the natural products industry. Success is frequently reserved for the bold, and Dr. Leung is one of the boldest people I know.
If you’d like to see more of why I get inspired by Dr. Leung, here’s a second YouTube video, this time of him discussing his life (warning: this one’s a little longer!). Please accept my apologies. The clip of Dr. Leung visiting about his history has been taken down for further editing. When it reappears, I will again link to it here.
