If you are looking for a job, you must join LinkedIn, an essential job search tool. If you are not looking for work, but you like networking online; or want to acquire new partners or customers; or want to speed up your level of networking activity, you should also become a LinkedIn user, in my opinion. All that said, there are some strict rules for courteous and professional use of the network. Here’s my Top Ten list of the dos and don’ts of LinkedIn:
1) CONNECT with your “real world” friends.
I’m amazed at how many LinkedIn users join, create a profile, and immediately went to work inviting all kinds of strangers online to join their networks. Sure, it’s fun browsing the LinkedIn database and looking for people you might want to know better … but what about your friends in three-dimensional space? The first thing you should do as a new LinkedIn user, after creating a great profile for yourself, is to invite your true friends and former co-workers to join your network. There are three steps in this process:
a) Download your Outlook address book so LinkedIn can find your friends who are already members.
b) Use the Find Colleagues and Find Classmates features to sync up with people you know from school and past jobs; and
c) Invite groups of “real” friends who are not yet LinkedIn users to join the network; It will help you connect while growing your own network.
2) DO NOT become an invitation spammer.
It’s tempting to start sending “Connect with Me” invitations to every Tom, Dick, and Sally you meet on LinkedIn, but it’s rude. If you want to communicate with someone you have seen has an attractive profile, send them a contact request rather than an invitation to join your network. A contact request, to use an offline networking analogy, is like an invitation for a coffee date. An invite to Connect is like asking someone to stand up. Unless you already know a person, don’t spam them with a “do you want to start recommending me to people and vice versa?” invitation – it’s creepy.
3) DO to others …
It’s amazing that a person sends connection invitations with me while proclaiming on their profile that no new connection invites will be accepted. Talk about everything that is taken and not given There are other LinkedIn users who set up a profile and make connections, and then specify in their profiles that they will not act on forwarding requests (a key piece of LinkedIn’s value). These messages say, I want to be on this site and get its value, but I don’t want to deal with other people’s requests. A modern Dante would design a special, awkward and crowded level of hell for these people: there are no campfires, but maybe an area where all connections are dial-up, cell phones can’t hold a signal, and no one helps you with anything. , retribution for the “me first” approach to online networking that he displayed in his most recent incarnation on Earth.
4) DO NOT make assumptions about your own irresistibility.
Connect invitations should clearly state why you expect your guest to bond with you, for example, because you are on the same fundraising committee or because your daughters are best friends in fifth grade. With so many activities cramming a typical entrepreneur’s schedule and so many people in the mix, it’s easy for people to forget how they know you. Similarly, even contact requests should make your case as clear as possible. A message that says “May I call you? We could collaborate” is not the strongest speech in the world. People are incredibly busy: If you are looking for work or looking for new clients, you can lose sight of the fact that a person needs a compelling reason to spend ten minutes on the phone with you.
It’s helpful to remember what I call the happy life web theory: When you approach a stranger, that person presumably leads a happy and fulfilling life without the benefit of knowing you. It is not enough to say “I invite you to eat!” or the online equivalent of that offer; A $ 25 lunch (or a brilliant phone conversation with you) might not be as hard to pass up as you think. So leave it there: this is what I can do for you, or this is what I need, or both.
5) Keep your profile updated.
Smallpox on the person who lets their LinkedIn profile languish! If you can’t bother keeping your profile up to date, why should someone else bother interacting with you? If I get a contact request, jump to the requester’s profile and find that their details don’t match the requester’s email, I’m already disappointed. Bonus: when you update your profile, you can send an explosive message with a single click to let your entire first grade network know about your news. Note: do not abuse this feature! Reserve profile update bursts for news about the order of a job promotion, book launch, or appointment to a national commission … rather than news like “I’ve started my PMP certification class.”
6) DO NOT confuse quantity with quality.
If you were a recruiter, you would build the biggest network you could, on LinkedIn or otherwise. After all, there is no downside to seeing and reaching a large pool of candidates when your job is to locate talent. But for the rest of us, it’s easy to confuse the notions of “a great network” and “a strong network”. The question to ask yourself is “could you recommend this person and could he recommend me?” Otherwise, the main value of any individual LinkedIn connection will be its ability to see your network (and vice versa). That’s not bad, but it would be a shame to mistake that kind of visibility for influence. Amassing connections can turn into an addiction of sorts, but abstinence will kick in when these quasi-strangers start asking you to respond to your dearest friends.
7) DO NOT transmit questionable requests.
I got religion on this subject in an instant last summer when a colleague asked me to send a fraudulent friend of mine to his business conference. “I can’t do it,” I wrote, “it’s purely a marketing message.” The gentleman’s reply message essentially ripped my head off, stating my initial knee-jerk reaction that his request was wrong. Feel free to stand up for yourself and your friends when incomplete applications come up (and they will). If you pass all the crap it finds you, your trusted friends will start to doubt you, and that’s a far worse fate than having to write to another LinkedIn user: “Sorry, but I don’t feel comfortable passing This on.”
8) DO NOT abuse the Find Colleagues feature.
LinkedIn’s Find Colleagues feature allows you to find former co-workers and send them connection requests without the middle man, a great help if you’ve lost your email addresses over the years. Unfortunately, it’s easy to abuse the feature by including fake employers or dates of employment in your profile. What can we say about this? If you believe in the wheel of karma, avoid the temptation to claim employers and dates of employment to which you are not entitled.
9) JOIN the PowerForum.
Novice LinkedIn users have a lot of questions, and a great place to get answers is the user group called MyLinkedInPowerForum. Send a blank email message to [email protected] to join the group and get LinkedIn (and general) networking tips. MLPF founder Vincent Wright is a helpful guide and mentor for LinkedIn users around the world. I can virtually guarantee that you will learn something useful from the daily conversation of the Forum.
10) Tune out bad apples when you need it.
Finally, it’s worth noting that LinkedIn gives you the ability to disconnect from other users if you find that the connection is no longer working for you. If you’re plagued by inappropriate requests or other annoyances from one of your connections, you can cut the cord and avoid recurring headaches. Some people just don’t understand the notion of an online community with standards and norms; and it is not your job to teach them how to behave. Just keep going.