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Not using LinkedIn? WTF?
By crooky | January 18, 2008
I can’t tell you how many times my LinkedIn account has saved my bacon as a consultant. If you’re not familiar with LinkedIn, it’s been around for about three years and in a nutshell, it’s a professional networking tool. It operates on the same principle as the Milgram’s Small World Experiment (sometimes referred to as “that six degree of separation thing”). The theory is that if you and a lot of people that you know declare your association with one another formally by adding each other to your trust network on LinkedIn (a first degree connection), you automatically add everyone in each others’ extended networks as a second degree connection and everyone in those individuals respective networks as third degree connections.
The utility of doing this is that if, say for example, you need to find a mechanical engineer in Calgary, you should be able to search your network through LinkedIn and find one. After identifying them, you should be able to get a personal introduction to them through your network. In practice, the system is more complicated and politicized than I have characterized it but overall, it’s a very valuable (and free) tool in your arsenal.
The above image shows my current LinkedIn stats. I have 179 people in my immediate network, nearly 13,000 people in my second degree network and over one million in my third degree network. Obviously, with 179 immediate connections dishing out nearly 13,000 people in my second degree network, there are some people in my first degree network that are network hubs. In LinkedIn terminology, these people are called LIONS - LinkedIn Open Networkers. These are people who believe that if you aren’t inviting everyone you know to join your LinkedIn network, you have a “Stagnating, Low-Quality Network”.
Frankly, I find this attitude naive and typical of people in careers where their livelihood depends on a steady pipeline of low-value, high churn transactional goods and services. If you’re not in sales of some kind, you have to stop and ask yourself what it says about you when you have several thousand people in your trust network. I’m more strategic in my networking initiatives and in contrast to LIONS, I’m a BEAR - Bravely Eating All the Rolaids (okay, I made that up but I was trying to keep with the Wizard of Oz theme). I’m a BEAR because I actually stress about the quality of my network and maintain my network - pruning where necessary.
Here are some advantages of using LinkedIn:
1. It’s a great way to centrally maintain your rolodex (less the people you know who don’t use LinkedIn). You can import and export contacts from LinkedIn into Outlook or your BlackBerry.
2. It’s a good, low-impact way to periodically update your network on your current status. Every time you update your profile (with a new job, for example) it sends an e-mail to every in your immediate network saying that you’ve changed jobs. I usually get 5-10 people from my network contacting me every time I update my profile. It’s a good excuse to get back in touch.
3. It’s an invaluable research tool (see my comments below). One of the hardest parts of market intelligence is identifying actual human beings to talk to. LinkedIn can give you names and job titles to go with companies you want to consult.
4. It’s a great way to show your CV to a range of people.
5. It’s a sounding board. You can ask questions of your network and get responses from a range of professionals. This can come in extremely handy if you’re facing a tough business situation.
You don’t need to have 10,000 people in your network to take advantage of a vast and extended LinkedIn network. Here’s an example of a trick I used recently: I needed to contact a materials science engineer at a large, local high tech manufacturing company. I didn’t have a contact there - I just needed to talk to someone in the materials science department. When I cold-called the company, I soon discovered that they have one of those impregnable automated voicemail systems that doesn’t actually let you talk to a human being. If you donn’t know a name or an extension - you get absolutely nowhere.
I started to think about the problem and messed around with LinkedIn for a while. When I entered the name of the company into the search bar, it turned out that there was someone in my second degree network that used to work for this company in a senior management position. This person also belonged to a networking organization that I belonged to and I’d met him once - albeit over a year earlier and just the once, very briefly. Once I had his name and the name of his company, I googled him and found his phone number easily.
I called this gentleman up, chatted to him like I’d just seen him yesterday and got the name of someone in materials science at the manufacturing company that I wanted to talk to. I also got a personal message to pass along to solidify the personal connection. It worked unbelievably well. That, to me, is the value of LinkedIn. A computer network can’t replace the personal touch so I don’t see the point in being a LION. I only want a high quality network that I can levarage quickly and easily. If I have to re-introduce myself to people in my immediate network, that’s not networking - that’s picking up the phone book and cold-calling people.
So, to summarize, I think LinkedIn is a great tool and would encourage other consultants to use it to their advantage but don’t be a LION - it can detract from your perceived quality as a consultant. If you’re not on LinkedIn, set up an account today. It’s free and it’s a hell of a lot more effective as a business networking tool than Facebook.
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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.
Topics: Business of Consulting |
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February 23rd, 2008 at 9:46 am
This was an excellent article. My biggest beef with LIONS is that so many of them violate the terms of the Linked User Agreement. The User Agreement specifically prohibits posting “content in fields that aren’t intended for that content.” Many LIONs include “TopLinkedIn”, “MyLink500″, “LION”, their number of connections, or their email address in the LinkedIn name field. Other people add characters such as an exclamation point, asterisk, bracket, or tilde before front of the first letter of their last name so their name appears on the top of alphabetical lists. I find this conduct to be childish and unprofessional.