By Frank White

Social profiles are a critical part of any marketing and biz-dev activity.

Author your profile in such a way as to accentuate the benefits of working with you, just like you would in the “about us” portion of your web-site.

In other words, it is about the reader, your potential client, not (again NOT) about you.

Ever check LinkedIn profiles? What does yours say about you?

Many check to see what a colleague is up to, or it could be to see if one really is in the industry or to explore a current position of a distant contact.

When crafting profiles we feel pressure to engineer words in such a way as to make ourselves into some weird and wild industry superhero.

Some use the third party approach, saying something like:

“Frank White, a C-level executive, invented pencils, internal combustion and Labradoodles, and he did this while saving starving, one-legged children in Hezbollah and ISIS refugee camps and performing volunteer eye surgery on guide dogs.”

“He then went on to invent cherry flavor.”

We know that these are actually written by the cat we’re checking out, so it all seems a bit trite to us — does yours border on the offensive or egotistical?

Also — who falls for that narcissistic crap?

When reading a “third person profile,” does the author think that the reader actually thought that Wolf Blitzer or Bob Costas wrote it? Like it is some kind of breaking news profile?

Come on.

For those that have written these types of profiles — our questions to you would be:

1) How’s it worked out for you?
2) Is your phone out of battery power (as a result of all the ringing)?
3) Have six guys called you today to assist them in the solving the cold-fusion process?

We suggest you invest a few in an in-depth audit on how your target audience reads your website and social profiles.

A healthy profile should gently inform the reader of his or her benefits by engaging with you and then a modest amount of industry credentials… not state all the authority, vision and accolades you have ever received since the second grade. We’re not saying don’t include customer recommendations, but there is a fine line between too much and your professional street cred.