I attended a two hour session this morning at Gerry Weinberg & Associates, the leading Detroit area Sandler Sales Training affiliate. The topic: Using LinkedIn to Get More Referrals. Naturally I attended.

One thing I learned was how to group your connections using the tag feature. I'm not sure how I missed out on this one, but it is there.

Using this feature, is incredibly easy.  All you need to do is select Contacts from the menu bar. On the drop down, select Connections. On the resulting screen, you will see where it says All Connections down the left. Immediately under that, you will see the various tags. Click on one and you can see who you have grouped into that tag.

LinkedIn seems to do some automatic tagging. When I looked at this earlier today, I had the following tags in place:

• partners
• friends
• group members
• colleagues
• classmates
• untagged

I'm guessing that LinkedIn did some automatic tagging based on my profile and connections profiles. For example, it has tagged 44 connections as colleagues - looking through it is a combination of people I indeed worked with at some point, and people that had a common past employer, usually Deloitte.

Friends is a bit more of a mystery, as it had people that I wouldn't automatically put into a "friends" category. I'm wondering if that is based on the connection invitation where people indicate they are a friend.

You can modify the tags - delete any you want, and add new ones. You can also tag a connection more than once. That could be good for someone you went to school with, then worked with and is now a client.

One thing I don't like (because I can be very anal) is that the tags all start with lower case letters. That just drives me nuts, so I'm going to do some cleaning up of this.

Any other tips you think people might not know? Please reply and let me know. Because I might not know it either!