I just finished up a brief conference call with a fellow conference committee member. We were chatting about LinkedIn, and pondering its role. And the reality is, for me, LinkedIn has absolutely no point.
In theory, I get that it’s useful to have a professional network separate from personal social networks. I get it to the point where I have two Twitter accounts: a private one, where I limit followers to ‘real people’ (ie no organisations – in fact, I only follow a couple of organisations from this account, which is a hangover from The Time Before Dual Accounts) and I aim to follow everyone back; and a public account, where I do follow organisations, and tweet much more selectively, with a focus on professional topics.
Facebook has a fairly well-defined purpose for me, too: I use it to keep up-to-date with what’s happening in my friends’ lives, to vent, whinge, moan, and, most importantly, to post photos of my delicious niece and nephew in the forum where the people who want to see them will actually see them. (I have a Flickr account, and I’d much rather post all of my photos to Flickr, but my friends and family aren’t in that space.) A few days ago, I did a major round of de-friending in Facebook. It’s a yucky process – it kind of feels like poking your tongue out, saying “You’re not my friend anymore!”, and flouncing away. But I did it, because I made the decision to limit my Facebook network to people I know and actually hang out with In Real Life. I guess I just wanted to declutter. I’d probably join in the Facebook exodus, if I could just get all my friends and family onto Twitter and posting their photos on Flickr…
Anyway, I digress…
LinkedIn: for me, it’s just a source of email alerts to “Join my network on LinkedIn”. I log in very occasionally to approve these requests, and that’s it. Aim I missing something? Is there some Great Point to LinkedIn that I’m completely missing?
I too have a LinkedIn acc and constantly wonder why when we have twitter?
I hear you re LinkedIn, been a member for years and it seems to serve no purpose for the spheres I move in. However it does seem more useful for IT mates in the IT world. Likewise with facebook, I ain’t leaving any time soon as there are many people there that I don’t connect with elsewhere.
Yeah – LinkedIn. Have it, but have yet to see any benefit from it. Twitter is more useful for me professionally, Facebook for family & friends but LI… it just sits there like an ornament a beloved aunty gave you… dusty but you can’t bring yourself to throw it away.
After Aurora a couple of participants set up a LinkedIn group, sent out invites to everyone, and I joined then. It’s been used for a couple of discussions, but been silent for the last couple of months. There’s a Facebook Group too, and for my mind, they didn’t really need both – now they’re just both empty and unused, whereas if we’d had just one we might have made something of it.
Like everyone else, I keep okaying the Join My Network requests, but nothing’s jumped out at me in LinkedIn to make me want to put in a whole lot of effort in cultivating it.
Katie
Looks like you have a lot of agreement going on here.
Not for the sake of being contrary, but because I do believe people could be missing out by too readily dismissing LinkedIn, I’d like to share a different point of view.
I guess it depends on what area you work in. Certainly it LinkedIn has been very helpful to a lot of people in the recruitment industry, for example. It has also been helpful to people who have landed dream jobs because they were on LinkedIn. It is common knowledge, I discovered in the course of research for a book on LinkedIn for recruiting, that high level and specialist technical positions can be particularly challenging to fill, because the people who would be good in such a position are often happy where they are, well paid etc. They are, I discovered, what are called “passive candidates”, not on job boards, not advertising for a position. But because they have a profile on LinkedIn and the search engine in LinkedIn can triangulate, so to speak, a quite specific search (skills, location, etc), they can often be tapped for a job they might not even have known about but would have wanted if they had, if you get my drift.
Last week I attended a Social Media Club event in Sydney where consultant Michael Field talked us through the Next Director group he set up: it has very clear rules of engagement, moderators and so on. He has found it very valuable. He said that from his active engagement on LinkedIn 100% of his business in the past twelve months has been from “inbound marketing”, i.e. he has done no active promotion (and as a marketer he was very surprised that he had not had to do that). He said he now has so much business coming to him he is able to choose who he wants to work with. There was no hint of boasting. From his own experience he wondered aloud why anyone in business would not be on LinkedIn, actively (actually he was more forthright than that, but out of context the spoken word does not always sit well).
But sure, LinkedIn is not going to be helpful for anyone who does not make active use of it and see it as a sharing environment – sharing quality connections, sharing discussions, sharing ideas. People need to know, however, that more and more professional people will check for them on LinkedIn before they take a meeting or consider someone for a position. In that case, is no profile worse than some profile? I don’t know that there is a simple answer but where someone does have a LinkedIn account, I believe an out of date or uninformative profile on LinkedIn could be deleterious to career and deal prospects.
By the way, I don’t accept the boilerplate “I’d like to add you…” “invitations”. I need to establish personal contact first and decide that there is a point to our being connected on LinkedIn.
hey des, great comment! it’s really useful to get some perspective on linkedin.
i can see the benefit for some industries with regard to recruitment – particularly those that are private-enterprise-ish. jobs can be hard to fill – especially those that are highly specialist. i guess perhaps the fact that the profession i’m in is centred around public-sphere organisations means that i’ve seen less of the shoulder-tapping in action. formal, often cumbersome recruitment processes are the name of the game, and in library-land, you see some positions readvertised again and again.
in my circle, no one seems to make recommendations, either, which i think is one potential valuable functionality that linkedin has.
i’m exactly the same with accepting invitations – i make judgments about who to connect with. i guess i am conscious of the potential that linkedin has (the potential that you talk about here), and that’s what drives my selective connecting in this space.
thanks for your insight here – it’s certainly made me stop and think about whether i need to put more effort into my linkedin profile.
I enjoyed your post Katie, and thoroughly enjoyed Des’s comment (I’d forgotten about Des, who I’d met at the Australian Blogging Conference – a great guy!).
His comment reminded me that I’d had a headhunter contact me about a really good position running a web development team at the Brisbane HQ of a national company. It came completely out of the blue but was a very legitimate offer. I didn’t follow up as I was happy with my position at the time, but it really surprised me.
On reflection I can think of at least 2 other guys who went on to better jobs via LinkedIn. However all of these jobs were more IT than LIS, so YMMV.
Oops, I neglected to actually mention that this headhunter contacted me about the job via LinkedIn.
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