I was just looking at my connections and noticed a new link that appears below each connections name…”View and Edit Details”. This is currently in beta, but it appears that you can add details such as phone number, address, email and notes to your contacts. Sounds great, right?
First let me say that I like that LinkedIn is adding functionality. The notes option could be interesting and a great way to track information to particular contacts. Now for the downside.
First, anything you add can be deleted if the person removes you as a connection. That may not be important since if the person removes you, you probably will not be contacting them in the future. This is a minor issue.
The real downside is that I already have all of my connections contact information in Cardscan, outlook and my Blackberry. (Because I usually have their business card before I send out an invitation.) I’m really not going to take the time to renter 250+ connection contact data into another application.
A better solution would be for LinkedIn to allow me to add this information to my profile and choose whether or not my connections can view this information. This is what Plaxo does and it’s one of the features I like about it. I still don’t really use Plaxo, but they at least have laid out the groundwork for a better way to handle this.
Another option (that Plaxo has) that I would like to see is the ability for me to classify my connections as a friend, business colleague, client, etc.
This is currently in beta so there is still the potential that this feature will be improved. For now it is a step in the positive direction.
A week or so ago my wife and I woke up at 1AM to the sound of a seal coming from my son’s room. For those of you with children, you may have experienced the joy of Croup. Croup is simply a virus that causes swelling in the throat, making it hard to breathe. My wife, the more detail oriented spouse, took my son to the emergency room and I stayed home with my two daughters.
Since I didn’t want to go back to sleep until they were home and I knew all was fine, I decided to catch up on adding some blog posts. Writing at 2 AM in the morning is not something I necessarily recommend.
Today I finally made it back to re-read the posts and I can’t say that they were the clearest posts I have written. And grammatically they were somewhat below par. The moral of the story is what you publish online, in emails, in letters, etc. is a reflection on who you are as a business professional.
I highly recommend that you read what you have written before sending or posting and that you spell check your work. So in this case do as I say not as I did. When you update your LinkedIn profile or make changes, copy what you have written and paste it in Word and run the spell check. Make any corrections and then copy and paste back into LinkedIn.
After all it’s your brand and if you don’t care enough to get it right, why will anyone else care.
(Spell checking this before posting found 4 errors)
One of the ways that I use LinkedIn is to connect with people in my local Chamber. Many of the meetings have anywhere from 45 to 70 people. It’s simply imposible to meet everyone.
I assume that most people attending have the same goal as me…to meet and network with as many people as possible. So after each meeting I send a LinkedIn invitation to those that I am not connected to. I’ve found that most often this connection (where I don’t personally know the person and have not had a prior conversation with) usually leads to a conversation at the next event. In fact I make it a point to introduce myself personally at the next meeting. LinkedIn can be a great ice-breaker.
Yesterday I sent out about 6 invitations to people that attended the same event yesterday morning. Two people chose to not connect, but it’s how they chose to not connect that impressed me.
Not everyone accepts the invitation, but Bill McDermott and Mitch Copman both took the time to email me back their reason’s for not accepting the invitation. That says a lot about them as a person. The reason’s for not connecting are irrelevant. Some people are Lion’s, some ar Closed networkers and some like myself are what I would call a Networker (someone who uses LinkedIn to connect to those they know and meet and to those they would like to know or meet). Each person has to choose the strategy that best works for them.
Do you respond to every connection request? Or do you sometimes ignore and archive requests that you choose to not accept? What you do says a lot about you as a person. I’m not connected to Bill or Mitch, but because they took the time to respond to my invitation, I will keep them in mind if I ever come across someone that would be a great lead or introduction for them.
A couple of weeks ago I talked with Vincent Wright who previously ran the MyPowerLinkedIn forum. He related that after years of evangelizing for LinkedIn he was asked to remove the reference to LinkedIn due to trademark infringement. At that point, I assumed that as a little fish the gotlinkedin.com domain was living on borrowed time.
Thus I bought this domain and begin planning the switch. Last week the email finally arrived asking me to cease and desist using the trademarked LinkedIn in my domain. Now, even though I think there is no possibility anyone would confuse my site with LinkedIn, I understand the reasoning behind LinkedIn enforcement of trademark law.
If they fail to protect their name now, it could be harder to do so in the future. So immediately I stepped up the conversion process. The first thing I did was hit “reply” to the email to inform them that I would do as they asked. Unfortunately the email bounced back, saying there was no such email.
So even though they asked me to respond to the email, I have yet to find a way to communicate my compliance, other than to place a blank page up on gotlinkedin.com to allow folks the opportunity to go to the LinkedIn site or to my blog.
So if you’re wondering why yhe name and domain name has changed, there you go. And with the domain name change, my linkedin book name has be changed as well to “LinkedIn 101“.
I try to read as many LinkedIn blogs each week. It’s getting harder as some of the best are disapearing. My favorite, LinkedIntelligence stopped posting on a regular basis about a month ago. MyPowerLinkedIn forum no longer covers linked in the same, as it was asked to stop using the word LinkedIn as part of the name. These are sites that talked and evangelized LinkedIn well before it was cool to the masses.
There are still a few that are worth reading…Imonlinkedinnowwhat, The Executives Guide to LinkedIn, The LinkedIn User’s Manual, and of course LinkedIn’s own blog.
I would expect that LinkedIn would use their blog to communicate with their 22 plus million users, but instead it seems to be aimed at developers and people in the tech industry. I get the feeling that it’s more important to them to talk about how cool they are in using the latest technologies that the average user could care less about.
Us users want to know how to use the site better, how other people are benefitting from LI, and what are you working on that will help us network better and grow our businesses. Every now and then a post touches on a user oriented topic, but they are few and far between. We don’t care what conference you recently presented at or how your interns first day was.
At a minimum, if LI is using their blog to shine their image with the tech and venture world, then they should create a second blog that is dedicated to it’s users. The techies and venture folks may be what pays the bills, but the users are what establishes the value.
