Creative professionals: put video on your LinkedIn profile

UPDATE: See below for how to put video on your profile with Box.net.

With the launch of the LinkedIn Applications platform, creative professionals can finally embed video on their LinkedIn profiles. Whether you're an artist, graphic designer, 3D animator, producer, filmmaker, telejournalist or actor, you need video to visually illustrate your creative accomplishments. It's one of the most common requests I've received when lecturing on LinkedIn. And now you can do it with Google Presentations or Box.net.

The process is simple: use Google Docs to create a presentation and embed a YouTube video in the presentation. Then install the Google Presentation app on LinkedIn and select that presentation to be displayed on your profile. With this solution, people can watch YouTube videos right on your profile. If you prefer to have a list of video files they can download, or a video not on YouTube, you can use the Box.net application to put a fileshare folder on your profile too.

UPDATE: What the demo below doesn't cover is Box.net's excellent capacity to play Flash video right on your LinkedIn profile. So while Google Presentation requires you to embed YouTube into a presentation, Box.net simply requires you to covert the video into Flash format (.flv) and drop it into your profile folder.
See my LinkedIn profile for an example - when you click on the LinkedIn Apps video, it loads and plays because it is in the .flv format. Whereas if you click on the LinkedIn Cannes video, it downloads, because it's in the .mp4 format. Here's a simple step-by-step:

1. Install the Box.net app on LinkedIn
2. Click on the folder labeled "Profile folder"
3. Click on the blue arrow and select "Upload"
4. Select a .flv/Flash video file from your computer

Once it's uploaded, anyone can view the video from your profile.

LinkedIn's application platform video series

So I've been mighty busy with lots of video editing work, and tonight I can finally showcase what I've been up to. For tonight's release of the LinkedIn Application platform, I produced demo videos for Amazon, Google, Typepad, Wordpress, Huddle, Box.net, Slideshare, TripIt, and two others created by LinkedIn. I also cut a sizzle reel showcasing all of them to entice you into their app-itude:

TechCrunch has aggregated all the demos together on their post, and you can read more from CNet, Newsweek, VentureBeat, Reuters, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Also, the corporate blogs of LinkedIn, Wordpress, Huddle, Slideshare, Box.net, Typepad and TripIt have covered the app launch — expect much more fuss made of it in the next 24 hours and beyond...

And btw, the apps are great. Log on to LinkedIn and start using them. So far, my favorites are Box, TripIt and CompanyBuzz, but I'll be trying out the others soon enough.