Kudos on LinkedIn - is it for you?

LinkedIn has been prolific in the last few months in rolling out a huge range of new elements across the site, often first on the mobile devices before then trialing and releasing them on the main desktop version.

One such feature that seems to have just received the ‘desktop treatment’ is called Kudos which was released about 6 weeks ago on mobile and allows you to thank specific people in your network for standing out in some way. They do this by giving you the chance to create and post an update containing an image which looks rather like a type of digital postcard, thanking that person for what they have done or given.

Now before those cynics among you switch off, that’s really quite a nice thing to do. We know how powerful and important ‘Recommendations’ are on the site and while there are some amongst us (my hand’s firmly ‘up’ at this point) who are less convinced about ‘Endorsements’ because of the rather random way they are given by some (hey, I have double figure endorsements for my skill in ‘Extreme Ironing’ which is fairly random in itself), there is clearly an attempt with LinkedIn Kudos not to let in get out of hand.

How are they going to achieve that, I hear you ask? Well, in order to make them stand out and be a bit more special, they are limiting us to sending a maximum of 3 per week, and so hopefully encouraging people to give a little more thought when giving them out.

How does Kudos work?

If you head on over to the profile of one of your connections – logically you can only do this to someone you are connected to – you should then look for the ‘three dots’ or ‘More’ button just to the right of the ‘Message’ button.

Click on that and at the bottom of the list, you will see a small ‘rosette’ image – this is where you can start to give others the recognition or ‘Kudos’ that you feel they deserve – on the mobile app, it works in very much the same way (which makes a nice change in itself!).

Kudos to the developers!

Sorry, I got carried away for a second there.

Clicking there then walks you through the process which is thankfully really short as most of the work is done for you. Your first step is to choose something that you wish to recognise your connection for and therefore select an appropriate message and associated image to send out.

These are set for you and the current messages to choose from are:

• Thank You
• Going Above and Beyond
• Inspirational Leader
• Team Player
• Great Job
• Making Work Fun
• Amazing Mentor
• Outside the Box Thinker
• Great Presentation
• Making an Impact

There’s no option to add your own at the moment but I suppose that could be possible going forward, though I think that would open up a proverbial can of worms that would best be avoided. As an aside, I still remember the choice selection of skills that some co-workers gave each other when you could add ‘Skills’ to other people’s profiles.

Anyway … these are associated with an image which then adds in your connection’s name such as below:

In this way you have an image, the name of the person that you are recognising and what you are recognising / thanking them for all in one nice ready made picture.

Full Kudos Options

This seems a good moment to outline all of the different images that you can work with – the following are the ones that we all have available:

The Final Result

As a final element, LinkedIn puts this together in a post format together with a ‘mention’ so that the person receives a notification that they have been recognised together with a #kudos hashtag and a hashtag for the reason they been ‘kudos-ed’ ie. #amazingmentor.

Personally, I would also encourage that adding a little bit of your own text wouldn’t go amiss at this point just to reinforce the message. I also makes it rather more personal than just throwing it out there … ‘personal’ is always going to beat ‘generic’ as I’m sure you’ll agree. So all together, this then gives you:

 So there you have it – nothing earth shattering it has to be said but a nice additional way of giving people a small pat on the back and a friendly thank you to boot. And we can all do with that now and again … can’t we?

So .. who are you going to Kudos today

Now that’s something I never thought I would catch myself typing …

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I am an independent LinkedIn trainer, LinkedIn speaker & consultant on LinkedIn and have been working with companies and professionals on applying LinkedIn to their businesses since 2009. You can find a selection of my recommendations here.

I run tailored in-house company workshops around the UK and internationally as well as public courses across the UK on how to get the best from LinkedIn as a sales, marketing or business professional and use it an an effective business tool ... all done without the hype that can so often accompany it.

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