When I was a Girl Scout back in the days when three-quarters of the girls in any elementary school were Girl Scouts, we used to talk about doing a good deed every day. Today, I don't whether we don't have time to do good deeds, or we do them and just don't talk about them, but good deeds seem to have dropped out of the conversation. Now that online networking is on the scene, it is possible to do good deeds anytime you get the urge. Here's how to do it: endorse a person you know.

Endorsements are a big deal on LinkedIn, for instance. Endorsements build credibility for LinkedIn users and are a factor in users' search rankings (for instance, when someone searches for Marketing people in Denver). There is another thing about endorsements that is important, too: the quality of the endorsement itself says a lot about the person being endorsed. That is, a more intelligent and pithy endorsement says not only "this person has colleagues who respect him" but also "this colleague has smart and articulate colleagues who respect him" (or her, of course).

One time, years ago, my friend John Bodfish was job-hunting. I was disconsolate because I loved working with John and I didn't want him to leave our company. But he was a tech guy at heart (he majored in Engineering at Purdue, for Pete's sake, and here he was working with me at a greeting-card company) and wanted to go work for a software company in Evanston, Illinois, associated with the Northwestern University research park. So John asked me to be a reference. I had a great talk with the guy who called me for the skinny on John. I told a bunch of John stories. Anyway, the guy said to John when he extended the offer, "You picked a great person to give you a reference!" That counts for a lot.

And it works the same way with endorsements. Sometimes, when I am bored, past midnight, I jump on LinkedIin and leave endorsements for people to find when they get online the next day. (You have to approve your own endorsements before they're published, so that people can't leave you anti-endorsements bashing you, for instance.) And I'll leave endorsements for people I haven't seen in years, and they'll write back and say "I can't believe you remember that time we did that project in Israel!" and we will re-connect. I take time to write the best endorsements I can, none of this ‘fine manager and human being' boilerplate. When it comes to endorsements, quality trumps quantity every time - although the two of them together aren't bad.

There is a bit of a problem on LinkedIn with endorsement-swapping and endorsement-fishing and that sort of thing, but if you read the endorsements carefully you can see past those things.

I got an email two or three weeks ago from Linda, a woman I worked with back at that same greeting card company, the one John Bodfish and I worked for. It's a crazy thing, because I had just been thinking about this Linda as I was jotting down story ideas for a weekly workplace-advice column I write. I was remembering this time when Linda and I had to terminate a woman who behaved like the character in the Herman Melville story, "Bartleby the Scrivener" - that guy who wouldn't do anything he was asked to do, and always said "I would prefer not to." I don't know that I could have come up with Linda's last name after twenty years, but she wrote to me out of the blue, so I can ask her for details about that incident. Then, I can endorse her fine work as a marketing manager twenty years ago. It's still relevant today, if you ask me. And if you're not as old as I am, you can endorse the people you work with now and the people you've worked with since you started working.

Endorsements take a minute or two, are free, and help other people out. What easier way could you find to fulfill your good deed requirement for the day?

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