Jame shows that a lot of people still just don’t get it:
Its funny the questions people ask when your LinkedIn profile goes from 6 contacts to 160 contacts in five days…
“Are you leaving Visiphor?”
“Did you get fired?”
“Are you bored?”
No, he just actually started using it.
After being sceptical in the past of social networking sites, I’m actually starting to find LinkedIn useful. It’s helped me reconnect with old friends who I’d lost touch with, and it’s even lined up a few good job opportunities for me as a result of my profile being available. In fact, I have a job interview this Friday courtesy of LinkedIn.
He goes on to describe how LinkedIn notified him of “two interesting developments” for a friend and a former colleague. This is one of the oft-overlooked features of LinkedIn I think is really cool. Everyone doesn’t send out an e-mail to everybody they know whenever something happens in their career (thank goodness!). But with LinkedIn, you can receive a weekly digest of career changes for all your close contacts. How cool is that?!?
LinkedIn: Fix Your Notifications
Bosko Milekic points out one of the shortcomings of an information architecture that doesn’t quite model reality. Like many other self-employed people, Bosko lists his “company” as “Independent” on LinkedIn. As a result, he keeps getting notices that colleagues from “Independent” have joined LinkedIn.
You’d think that after all this time they’d get that “Independent” doesn’t mean “Independent Co.”, especially given that I get these every once in a while (in other words, other people are using “Independent” to describe “independent work,” as in “independent consulting,” as in not “Independent, The Company”), and these people are likely getting the same annoying spam.
To be fair, people who choose to do this are putting data in the field that is not what the field was designed for. It says “company”, and if you have no company, it really should be blank.
Quotes:
[T]he nature of one’s work has a lot to do with the quantity AND quality of one’s ‘contacts’ on any network. Some need strong relationships to accomplish his/her objectives, others need quantity, regardless of quality.
Well said! That could have come straight out of The Virtual Handshake.
Thom Singer in the same thread (Thom is a networking guru extraordinaire and author of Some Assembly Required:
A digital link to someone is not a “relationship”. Many people I have never met (or heard of) send requests to me to be “linked”. I do not accept such requests, as they would not be useful contacts. I only link to those I have met in person or had meaninful other contact with in the past.
Those who collect links to have big numbers do themselves no good and hurt the credibiltiy of LinkedIn. Just because someone has a digital link to someone does not mean they have credibility. Networking is about visiblity and credibility. People do business with people they know and like.
Hi
Thanks for linking to my post (The title should be ‘So Is Everton Blair’ not ‘So Is Imaran Ali’ BTW!). I work very hard now to make sure my profile is up to date on linkedin, because it features so highly on searches and I want people to see the best information about me when they ‘Google’ me. The range and breadth of my connections are also a plus, as it demonstrates to potential employers the wide range of contacts and connections I can draw upon quickly.
Everton
Sorry for not paying closer attention to that — fixed now!