Wow. I’m 10 days into my LinkedIn experiment, and it’s already becoming much larger and more unwieldy than I would have expected. I thought I would have Phase 1 finished a few days ago, but instead it’s looking like it may…never finish!
Here’s the update:
The best way to transfer your contacts into LinkedIn is to upload your address book. However (rather embarrassingly), my address book was a mess. I hadn’t updated it in four years. Instead I just archived all my emails and found contacts via Yahoo mail search as needed (surprisingly effective, but not ultimately the best solution.) So my experiment started out with a massive address book cleaning–long overdue, total pain in the neck, but it feels great to have done it.
Here’s my first week of LinkedIn, by the numbers.
- 35: Approximate number of hours it took me to clean up my address book.
- 4000: Approximate number of emails deleted from my archives.
- 800: Approximate number of out-of-date contacts deleted from my address book.
- 1200: Approximate number of current contacts added to my address book. (Just finished last night. Phe-ew!)
- 400: Approximate number of Yahoo contacts who are already on LinkedIn.
- 271: Number of “join my network” invitations I’ve sent via Linked In since 12/06.
- 154: Number of members in my network currently
- 3: Number of people who’ve said they don’t know me
This last number is a bit sinister because, apparently, whereas in the real world if people don’t want to know you they can just ignore you, if they don’t know you on LinkedIn, you get penalized. I don’t know how this penalization works yet, but I’m trying to find out.
I think the most frustrating thing about that is, if it turns out the person actually does know you and just spaced out (as was the case w/one of mine), that individual can’t go back and change his or her answer. So one hair-trigger response can affect you negatively, and the person on the other end may not be aware of it, and there’s nothing either of you can do.
I may be wrong about this. As I said, I’m trying to get an answer from LinkedIn customer service.
In other news, I have not received any job offers out of LinkedIn yet. This is somewhat disappointing–you will recall that it promised me 3.5 times more than I had been getting. And upon a closer look, the language goes, “you’re 3.5 times more likely to receive a job offer for every 5 contacts you add.” Oh really! So where are my, um, I guess that’s 2 x 3.5 x 24 (120 contacts added / 5 ) = 168 new gigs!
Ah, well. Perhaps in time.
Anyway, I’m being facetious, because I didn’t start this experiment with the expectation of getting 168 job offers in a week. I did it to explore the potential benefits. And here’s what I’ve experienced to date:
- Reconnected with several old friends and colleagues–always a pleasure, especially in the cases where we’d been out of touch for years.
- Have “met” a couple new folks, who had been on the books for some reason, but whom I’d never spoken with previously. They responded to my LinkedIn invite with a personal note, I followed up, and now we’re truly on each other’s radar. This always feels warm and fuzzy; whether you call it “building a network” or “making a connection” or (my personal favorite) “making a friend.” It’s good to know somebody out there is interested in you.
- Several people have reached out to me, to see what projects I’m working on and whether we might help each other. In one case, my answer was a definite “Yes, please, immediately”– and as a result, I now have two amazing leads on potential female protagonists for a documentary treatment I’m developing. Absolutely no way could I have found them without the assistance of one Karen Cleary of Boundless Journeys, who made the introduction without gaining anything for herself…all on the strength of one previous conversation and a LinkedIn invite.
(Shout out: Thanks Karen. PR types like you make the world go round .)
- Finally…and this is the most important thing for anyone w/questions of his or her own about LinkedIn: On Friday, I made the acquaintance of Marc Freedman–aka My LinkDaddy.
With 20,000 connections in his files, Marc is what some people call an “uber-networker.” I would have probably called him a “zealot.” However. Marc agreed to do an interview with me about LinkedIn–which we completed an hour ago (no dilly-dallying in these parts!). And while he’s definitely an uber-networker, he’s definitely not a LinkedIn zealot. Which makes him much more valuable in terms of answering questions.
I’m going to post the Marc Freedman interview as soon as I can edit it down to a reasonable length, and I definitely encourage everyone to read it. Not only is he knowledgeable, but he is the epitome of the “pay-it-forward” player. It was very interesting to tap into that mindset–particularly coming from Los Angeles, where the standard question tends to be, “What can you do for me?”
In the meantime, check out Marc’s page at: http://MyLinkDaddy.com
And/or join the experiment at http://www.linkedin.com/in/lenakatz
Send me a note with your invite, please–otherwise I’ll have to check “I don’t know this person,” and then the LinkedIn police will put a black mark by your name….
This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Strategery, Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.2 Responses to “LinkedIn Diaries Part II–Uploads, Updates and Debates”
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December 18th, 2007 at 9:31 am
Hello Lena
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.
December 19th, 2007 at 4:59 am
Lena,
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
–
Steven Tylock
Author of The LinkedIn Personal Trainer
http://linkedinpersonaltrainer.com/