In the past couple of weeks, I have tried to utilize LinkedIn in the way its makers ostensibly intended. I have not attempted to “connect” with people I don’t know (that is the final frontier), but I’ve experimented with all the LI capabilities that relate to people I do know.
In a most unscientific manner, here are my findings:
- Only 20 percent of my contacts are on LinkedIn.
- Only 10 percent of them are active on LinkedIn.
- Out of 350 invitations sent, 120 still remain outstanding.
- Three people have already e-mailed me directly to inform me that they don’t use LinkedIn and would like to continue communicating using traditional methods.
- Four people have said they were going to accept my invite but didn’t, so I still talk to them via Yahoo Mail, on the phone or at happy hour.
- Three people have reported that they tried to connect but weren’t able to.
- Two people have emailed me back to say hello but have not accepted my LinkedIn invite.
- Six people have said they didn’t know me.
- Of that number, two realized straightaway that it was an accident. They tried to fix the record on LinkedIn, but it wasn’t possible. Three more would probably do the same thing if I said anything, but I don’t want to deal with it because we all have better things to do right now. When I do contact them again, it will be directly, for a specific purpose other than rectifying a social networking mixup.
- I asked five people for recommendations. Of that number, three recommended me. One ignored my request but updated my website (we’ve got a trade deal, and right now I’m getting the best of it). The final person said “No, because I think LinkedIn doesn’t do justice to either the recommending party or the recommendee. I will give you any personal recommendation you want and help you in any way I can, but I will not write anything on that website.”
- I recommended several colleagues. Only two wrote back to acknowledge that they’d seen and liked what I’d said.
- I forwarded two job requests from contacts and got no responses.
My verdict for LinkedIn’s potential as a a contact management/networking system? It takes too much work.
Too much exporting. Too many notes to write. Too much managing, mollycoddling and appeasing the LinkedIn police. Seriously. In a normal world, my contacts just sit in my address book till I need them, at which point I e-mail the appropriate person and say:
Hi! Here’s who I am, what I’m working on, and what I need. Can you help?
They say yes or no, and we move on.
In a LinkedIn world, I e-mail tons of them for no reason except to say: “Hi. Do you remember that we know each other? Okay, so let’s publicly acknowledge that we know each other, and then let’s go on about our business and not ever answer our LinkedIn e-mails anymore b/c we don’t really use LinkedIn for e-mail, we use Outlook or Gmail or Yahoo like every other person in the civilized world.”
Then you sit and wait for all those contacts to jump on your bandwagon. Probably only 50 do. An additional 45 languish in your archives. If you’re me (large network, but some of ‘em I only talk to once a year), a few people will e-mail to say “How do we know each other?” You explain, they say “Wassup? Good to hear from you!” and that’s the end of it.
The final two or three say “I Don’t Know This Person,” which makes you feel unmemorable, not very charismatic and also like a LinkedIn pariah, because you know you get spanked for those IDKs. So you e-mail them and say, “What the heck, am I that forgettable?” And they say “Nooooo!” and try to fix the setting but can’t, and then everyone’s irritated.
But still. I’m going to complete the final bit of this journal soon. I will e-mail five contacts and see whether the LinkedIn job networking thing really works. Maybe it will, and I’ll get tons of gigs and be forced to take back everything I said. Wouldn’t that be nice?
In the meantime, I’ve got 120 outstanding invitations that I really need to deal with, and I think sending 120 individual notes is the only way to do it. Which really defeats the purpose of LinkedIn, but reconnects with lost contacts; which is something worth doing, regardless of the communication mode.
This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 1:49 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Laptop Meditations, Nuts & Bolts, 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.One Response to “LinkedIn Diaries Part III — Rigmarole”
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January 12th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
Lena, my experience with LinkedIn is much different, but my goals with it are different too. I run a blog for logistics and supply chain. Occasionally I want to write about a topic that requires more research than I have as personal knowledge. LinkedIN has proven extremely valuable in terms of an extended knowledge base.
Here is a specific article that describes my experience.
http://www.freightdawg.com/2007/05/linked_answers_.html