Thoughts on LinkedIn

I have been using LinkedIn for the past few months as a networking tool. A few comments:

1. I attended a conference few months ago where a number of people from Investment Banks were collecting business cards, but did not have any to distribute. I could understand one person forgetting their cards, but not multiple people from the same bank. Clearly, they wanted to find people, but not be found. LinkedIn offers the opportunity to find people who want to be found, who want to interact and share ideas, who are seeking professional relationships and opportunities.

2. The larger your personal network, the larger your pool of prospects from which you can search and reach out to. Initially, I was restricting myself to people that I know. But, I have changed my approach, and have accepted linkages from people I've never met. Why? This provides a greater opportunity to interact with their contacts, and their contacts contacts. However...

3. The drawback to this in my mind is that it can be overdone. If you link to one of the LinkedIn "sluts" (a term that is used a lot within the LinkedIn community), you have a huge network. But, the reality is that people are busy...too busy to sit there and process LinkedIn requests. You may connect to someone who has 5,000 contacts, and is 3 degrees away from someone you want to contact, but that 5,000 contact person probably receives a LOT of contact requests. One request recently reached me after two months of being passed through the network. I don't have a good answer to this...I'm not even necessarily convinced that it's a problem. However, people have to realize that the connections are not automatic; that some effort and patience is required by every member in the chain for it to work. There is an honor system element to this which I find very interesting.

Overall, I like the service. Over the past two weeks, I have met (via email and phone) several excellent contacts with whom I hope to do business with some day. It does take some effort for it to work well, though, both in terms of seeking new contacts and making connections, as well as helping those who seek contacts through you.

Comments

[Thibaud Caillet]

Nice blog Carlos; people are not indeed always that proactive in Linkedin.
We'll talk about the difficulty to change "networking" minds in the old continent on July 5 in Paris, a nice conference to attend !
http://www.g9plus.com/manifestation.asp#120

[Des Walsh]

Carlos
Nice summary on Linkedin. Loved - and was appalled by - the story of the bankers who wanted to fish but not be found! Which reminds me I went to a seminar the other day and the guy who gave an excellent presentation on search engine optimisation had not brought any cards to hand out - not because he only believed in online contact, he just hadn't brought them. I wanted to refer someone to him and had to go to some trouble to find out how to reach him.
Des

[Marc Freedman]

Carlos,

Excellent points. I too increasingly find people without cards. At our DallasBlue events I publish attendee names for everyone so people can look one another up on LinkedIn. Thank you for joining us at LinkedIn Innovators.

Marc Freedman
> Profile at Who's Your http://LinkedInDaddy.com
> Be a http://LinkedInPro.com with select LinkedIn and Networking Resources