LinkedIn making professional connections

Many of you have heard of LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a professional networking website.

Most LinkedIn profiles are made from uploaded resumes, but one's profile can be only the information a user would like to present to the public. LinkedIn earns it's revenues primarily from recruiters who would like to be able to search the 1st and second degree connections of the candidates they have Linked with on LinkedIn. This is nothing like spokes or jigsaw which are both tit for tat systems for contact information.

LinkedIn limits your ability to send messages to people. This means it is spam free. When you start out on LinkedIn it can be very difficult to use. If you have 10 people you trust and do business with maybe five will be active on LinkedIn and willing to accept your invitation to connect. When you connect to these five people they will often hide their connections from perusal. This means that you will often not be able to click on the connections link in their profile and read up on all of the people they have linked to.

If each of these five people has five connections you will have 25 second degree connections searchable by specific keywords. So if you know your friend knows a PhD in linguistics but you don't know anything else you can search for "PhD in linguistics" and the PhD's profile will show in the search even though the person connecting you to the PhD has explicitly requested that you are not able to peruse his connections. The first degree connections of these 25 second degree connections will also be visible to you, these are your third degree connections.

When you start out on LinkedIn it seems pretty redundant. Everything you find tends to be people you have heard of through conversations with the people you know. This is not very useful.

The advantages of LinkedIn come only with groups and LIONs.

When you join a group on LinkedIn, most of the group members will accept messages from other group members. This enables you to connect to professional and academic Alumni with common interests or professional synergy who you otherwise may never discover. By joining groups you brand your profile with the group logos and give recruiters and other users a sense of who you are.

LIONs are LinkedIn Open Networkers. It sounds like a dirty name. Why in the world would anyone want to promote themselves as someone who would "be open to any and all invites". Networking is supposed to enable people to grow connections less desperate then themselves not more desperate.

When I was under heavy pressure at work to learn what was going on in the offices of a handful of CIOs across the country I was a little desperate for information. So I added LION recruiters located in the zipcodes of the CIOs I needed to understand as part of my consulting practice. Through this network of LIONs I then saw many more LIONs searchable in LinkedIn. At that point I could be selective when it came to LIONs. I could choose the LIONs that shared groups and professional alliances with me and my company. I called into their offices to verify that they were indeed working where they said they worked and unlinked those LIONs who I could not verify.

So through searching, adding and filtering one can grow a networking of professional connections in large numbers from the comfort of their keyboard.

The number of direct connections a person has on LinkedIn is not a competition. If anything access to exclusive professional groups with strict verification is quite competitive but just as competitive as it is to get into these professional groups in any walk of life.

Please call me on my phone if you would like to connect on LinkedIn. It would be nice to hear the sound of your voice and learn a little about what has you curious.

I thought you ought to know that.

-David Caro-Greene