Comments on: Asymmetrical Relationships and LinkedIn

By: Scott Allen

Scott Allen — Fri, 11 May 2012 20:40:37 +0000

100% agreed Duncan.

By: Duncan

Duncan — Fri, 11 May 2012 18:31:45 +0000

I think your suggestion about telling people to include a note about where or how you’ve met, however briefly, is the key. If a lot of people might have this type of asymmetrical relationship with you, you’re probably going to get a lot of connection requests. It makes it pretty hard to process, let alone remember when you might have met those people.

Even a short one- or two-sentence note with the source of the connection makes that person go from some random stranger on LinkedIn (or any other social network for that matter) to someone with whom you have something in common.

By: Jon D.

Jon D. — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:48:13 +0000

This is fantastic advice about LinkedIn. I’m an attorney and am in your shoes – my clients know me, but I don’t necessarily know about their business as a customer.

I like your approach in the way you leverage the connection with a mention about your talk. It’s networking. I’m just starting to work on LinkedIn (looking into it seriously) and I can see from this post that it can by extremely valuable when done right. It’s cyber-networking which I love to do.

By: Ian

Ian — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:14:13 +0000

Way to break the relationships down. I typically stray from any sort of social networking site; whether it is for business or personal use. This is because like you said, it does take a lot of effort and it also take maintenance, consistency and I don’t really enjoy creating relationships with people. I guess I need to get around this some how if I ever intend on starting my business!

Ian

By: Anna

Anna — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 03:26:21 +0000

I joined Linked in and do a lot of live networking, so I get lots of Linked In invitations. Although I know it should be making using of them, I didn’t really know where to start. Thanks for the useful tips.

By: Linked Intelligence » Blog Archive » Writing Great LinkedIn Invitations

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 07:45:39 +0000

[...] said, there are some exceptions. One thing LinkedIn doesn’t handle very well is asymmetrical relationships. Typically, a vendor doesn’t necessarily know a whole lot about their customer, except maybe that [...]

By: Now Is Gone » B2B Social Networking Usage

Now Is Gone » B2B Social Networking Usage — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 11:12:08 +0000

[...] provides interesting asymmetrical relationships, and is more trust oriented. As a result, it has become a preferred business social [...]

By: Kris Rzepkowski

Kris Rzepkowski — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:06:09 +0000

Hi Scott,
I did attend one of your presentations eons ago, when you were first doing your webinars. You’ve continued to build on your valuable advice which I appreciate very much. So, my question on this post is…What features could/should LinkedIn build to help sort out this asymmetry?

Features like Facebook’s Social Timeline, or being able to categorize your lists of connections after classifying them, perhaps having classifications automatically created for you based on activity levels, would provide ways better leveraging this asymmetry. I don’t think it would turn everyone into open networkers, but it might encourage just a few more loose connections to be maintained.

By: Khurt Williams

Khurt Williams — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:18:35 +0000

Timely post. I am taking a good look at my LinkedIn connections and realize that I know some of these are connections in only a cursory way. I work at the same firm as a lot of my connections and may have seen the names on memos, email etc..but I do not personally know their work. Alsor, they do not personally know my work. So some of these connections are just, as you stated, “electronic” links.