Great article – I know that the IDKY issue is a problem that everyone will experience at one time or another. In fact, I now have to add email addresses to all of my request for network connections because 3 or 4 of the people I’ve not communicated with in the past several months, did not recognize my name since I’ve changed industries. Of course that did not stop them from asking me to get LinkedIn with them a week later.

I hope that you have better success in getting LinkedIn to address this annoyance.

Nice article and experiment;-)

My favorite demo on why someone wants to be a part of LinkedIn is asking them attributes about the people they’d like to get introduced to (company, industry, position, etc) and then searching (and showing them the results) - and saying - with your connections, you’d do better…

The IDKY answer - in order to get introduced to someone, you need a chain of trusted connections. Connecting to people that you don’t trust to introduce into your VIPs breaks that chain. (or connecting to so many people that you get swamped with invitation requests such that you no longer respond to them)

When you get enough IDKY dings, the system considers you an inviter of people that you don’t know - and limits your invitation so that others (who are not as welcoming of blind invitations) are not annoyed.

People who dislike invitations from random people in the world like this feature…

My personal policy is to network with everyone, and connect to people I know and trust. (So I’m not going to invite you, and would not accept an invitation today - but I am very open to continuing to network and may well accept sometime in the future when I do know and trust you more;-)

I’ve written “The LinkedIn Personal Trainer” as a resource for those wanting a concise guide to using LinkedIn. If you’d like a copy to review, please contact me privately.

Here’s to continued success with the experiment!-)

steve
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Steven Tylock
Author of The LinkedIn Personal Trainer
http://linkedinpersonaltrainer.com/