First up? CheckIn. Here’s how it works: At an event, let’s say you stop by an employer booth and give your name and email address to a recruiter. Although this is technically from a recruiter’s vantage point, the talent acquisition professional can send follow up messages to you through the site. As of July, we hear this will be fully up and running.

As for the other new enhancement, LinkedIn is changing their social campaign. Again, this is from a recruiters standpoint but it’s still good to know the inside scoop. Previously, recruiters could send updates to company followers via their company page. Well, they’ll be able to do it from “Recruiter” going forward and will be able to track responses.

It’s been a busy week for the professional networking site. Earlier this week, they announced an enhancement to LinkedIn Today by introducing multiple channels. Associate product manager Kevin Gu wrote in his blog post on the site, “Through channels you can follow broader topic areas that cross multiple industries and professional sectors. By following channels you will have access to timely and relevant professional news and insights that can help you stay one step ahead and be in the know on what’s trending in your professional network.”

He added, “Channels represent a more comprehensive way to discover, share, and engage with high-quality Influencer posts, top news sources, and SlideShare content — all in one place.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

• Build a strategic profile on LinkedIn that is rich in keywords and SEO tags
• Research companies and build relationships with new contacts
• Start, join, and partake in LinkedIn Group discussions
• Develop a comprehensive LinkedIn Company Page for your business or brand

This new course starts on May 14, 2013 and early registrations prior to May 13 will save $50. Use the code LINKEDIN50 to redeem. Limited seating is available, so don’t wait! Register today and start building your professional relationships.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Although execs revealed they still frequently use Twitter (27%) and Facebook (44%), LinkedIn got top billing. The second tier encompassed blogs, Pinterest and Google+.

A similar study was conducted three years ago and over the years LinkedIn has increased its lead to surpass other Web sites. In addition to the sites logged onto most frequently, the study showed that executives engage in social media only one hour or less per week. And although they’re not avid users, they are daily users.

Executives revealed in the survey they would be engaged more online if they were actively searching for a new career opportunity, if they better understood the benefits and if the items learned were consistently high value.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Charity work and professional affiliations

Even if it doesn’t relate to the media biz, fulfilling work you do outside of a paying job can be a great conversation starter. Plus, you never know if the person scoping out your profile knows someone involved in that organization. So, if you spend Sundays tutoring kids at the local community center or helping your child’s PTA organization, include it on your profile.

Likewise, listing professional groups you belong to is a good idea because it builds credibility. (It’s the perfect chance to list those organizations that you pay to belong to just so you can list them on your resume!)

Read more in What Job Seekers Should (and Shouldn’t) Include on Their Social Media Profiles. [subscription required]

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

On Saturday, the social networking site for careers blogged about an update to last week’s situation. Vicente Silveira wrote:

By now, many of you have read recent headlines reporting that 6.5 million LinkedIn hashed passwords were stolen and published on an unauthorized website. We take this criminal activity very seriously so we are working closely with the FBI as they aggressively pursue the perpetrators of this crime. As you may have heard, there have been reports of other websites that have suffered similar thefts. We want to be as transparent as possible while at the same time preserving the security of our members without jeopardizing the ongoing investigation. In this post, we want to address questions we’ve been receiving and share what we’ve learned so far about the incident, how we’ve responded, and what we’re doing to protect our members going forward.

First, it’s important to know that compromised passwords were not published with corresponding email logins. At the time they were initially published, the vast majority of those passwords remained hashed, i.e. encoded, but unfortunately a subset of the passwords was decoded. Again, we are not aware of any member information being published at any time in connection with the list of stolen passwords. The only information published was the passwords themselves.

Here are the most common questions we are being asked by our members:

1. Am I at risk of having my account breached?
Thus far, we have no reports of member accounts being breached as a result of the stolen passwords. Based on our investigation, all member passwords that we believe to be at risk have been disabled.

2. News of the theft broke on Wednesday. Why didn’t I immediately receive notification that my password was disabled?
As soon as we learned of the theft, we launched an investigation to confirm that the passwords were LinkedIn member passwords. Once confirmed, we immediately began to address the risk to our members, prioritized as follows:

Based on our investigation, those members whom we believed were at risk, and whose decoded passwords already had been published, had their passwords quickly disabled and were sent an email by the Customer Service team.

By the end of Thursday, all passwords on the published list that we believed created risk for our members, based on our investigation, had been disabled. This is true, regardless of whether or not the passwords were decoded. After we disabled the passwords, we contacted members with instructions on how to reset their passwords.

3. What is LinkedIn doing to protect its members?
We have built a world-class security team here at LinkedIn including experts such asGanesh Krishnan, formerly vice president and chief information security officer at Yahoo!, who joined us in 2010. This team reports directly to LinkedIn’s senior vice president of operations, David Henke.

Under this team’s leadership, one of our major initiatives was the transition from a password database system that hashed passwords, i.e. provided one layer of encoding, to a system that both hashed and salted the passwords, i.e. provided an extra layer of protection that is a widely recognized best practice within the industry. That transition was completed prior to news of the password theft breaking on Wednesday. We continue to execute on our security roadmap, and we’ll be releasing additional enhancements to better protect our members.

4. My password has not been disabled, what should I do now?
If your password has not been disabled, based on our investigation, we do not believe your account is at risk.

However, it is good practice to change your passwords on any website you log into every few months. For that reason, we have provided information to all of our members via theLinkedIn Blog, as well as a banner on our homepage instructing members on how to change their passwords.

Once again, we truly apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you, our members.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Here is the post written by Vicente Silveira:

We want to provide you with an update on this morning’s reports of stolen passwords. We can confirm that some of the passwords that were compromised correspond to LinkedIn accounts. We are continuing to investigate this situation and here is what we are pursuing as far as next steps for the compromised accounts:

1. Members that have accounts associated with the compromised passwords will notice that their LinkedIn account password is no longer valid.
2. These members will also receive an email from LinkedIn with instructions on how to reset their passwords. There will not be any links in this email. Once you follow this step and request password assistance, then you will receive an email from LinkedIn with a password reset link.
3. These affected members will receive a second email from our Customer Support team providing a bit more context on this situation and why they are being asked to change their passwords.

It is worth noting that the affected members who update their passwords and members whose passwords have not been compromised benefit from the enhanced security we just recently put in place, which includes hashing and salting of our current password databases.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused our members. We take the security of our members very seriously. If you haven’t read it already it is worth checking out my earlier blog post today about updating your password and other account security best practices.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

According to an article on The Daily Muse, there are a few strategies to land new gigs. Even if you’re already doing some of them on a daily basis, it’s good to be reminded you’re on the right track.

1. Do pro-bono work at first. In the piece, Jessica Gordon writes, “Doing work for free obviously isn’t a long-term strategy, but it is a great one if you’re just starting out and trying to make contacts. If there’s a website you love or a business you want to work for, volunteer to write a blog, document an event, or do some design work for free.”

Is this a beneficial way to get your foot in the door? You bet. The only key is to not continuing to work for free in the long-term. In the short-term it’s a savvy move but once you get the experience, meet new contacts or have your mission accomplished, look elsewhere. As in paying clients.

2. Build a website and self-promote via social media. “Promote it like crazy,” she writes in the piece. Yes, this means Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr. Shout it from the rooftops! Make your entire network aware that you’re available and looking for freelance work!

Some people may have issues with asking for help but if you ask, you will likely receive. Leveraging social media is also a great way to follow editors you’re interested in connecting with; find out what’s on their brains and more importantly, if they share this information, what they’re working on.

3. Get your work into new clients’ hands. A portfolio is important but making sure people actually see it is truly valuable. In the piece, an illustrator subscribes to ADBASE, a database of publishers, design firms and ad agencies. This database continuously updates its content as art directors move around so you don’t have to stay abreast of their whereabouts.

4. Break out of your shell. Now is not the time to be shy; put in face time, meet up with new contacts for coffee, and accept the fact that you may be shy in most parts of your life but this is not one of them. Force yourself outside of the comfort zone by going to events even if you may not feel like it and giving yourself the challenge of exchanging business cards with one person; at the next event increase it to three, etc.

5. Search online job postings. Okay, this may sound like a no brainer but sometimes we may get so caught up in introducing ourselves to new people and offering our services and updating our statuses that we overlook the most obvious one of them all: Job listings. Yes, recruiters and editors actually review resumes so if you think your CV will be submitted into a black hole, think again. And if you don’t think you’re exactly qualified for a specific opportunity or you’re looking for freelance work and the job posting indicates full-time, it never hurts to introduce yourself as a freelancer for potential gigs down the road.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

You need to give people a reason to visit SHRM on a daily basis. Migrating content and ongoing conversations from the existing website into a new, fancy user interface isn’t going to help create a destination.

SHRM’s social network needs a face, and Lon O’Neil isn’t it. You can’t even get to his biography unless you are a member, which is problem #1. So much of the site is locked behind a wall, and SHRM would benefit from creating a community manager position that operates like a true community manager &#151 someone who is big enough to have a personality that drives traffic to the site but small enough to be a guide. I cited Jason Davis as a good example of a leader, a moderator, and a mediator when his community needs it.

I think the most important part of building a community is creating a space for important conversation and interactions that you can’t get anywhere else. Don’t try to be Facebook because even Facebook sucks at being Facebook. Focus on the purpose of the community &#151 and create a user interface that is flexible enough to adapt and grow as the community matures.

So is she right? Tell us what you think SHRM‘s new network should have and we’ll try to get a sit down with Gary Rubin ourselves to get your voices heard!

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

According to the release:

Plaxo members in the United States will now see a new Jobs section on Plaxo.com, where hiring managers and recruiters can post new job listings, and where job seekers can browse or search postings from across the Simply Hired network. In a unique twist, jobs posted on Plaxo are turbo-charged with the “social power” of the poster’s extended network. They can be shared, re-shared, and commented upon, like any other shared content on Plaxo. In addition, Plaxo members will start to occasionally see highly targeted job listings in their Pulse stream, based on the professional info on their profiles.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

*Only 27 percent of subscribers to LinkedIn are recruiters and hiring managers.

*Hedge funds use it to source experts.

*They only became profitable in the last two quarters, with Q4 being their highest revenue quarter ever.

*They have three main sources of revenue, subscription fees, advertising, and in Hoffman’s words, “We have a software-as-a-service business primarily driven by recruiting…We are the disruptive low-cost provider of really good hiring services.”

Want to know more about the business of LinkedIn and what they can do for you or your career? Watch the video!

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.