LinkedIn Advice from Zohar Kaplan

I sometimes don’t recognize something new until it hits me over the head – a few times.  So when I realized that I had heard about this workplace tool three times in as many days, I thought I should check it out.

The tool is called LINKEDIN.  It’s a social networking site for business professionals and career –minded folks- a MySpace for professionals, if you will- that’s gaining a steady following. I recently received a press release from a company touting its recent growth.  

Last week I received a link from a colleague to his column explaining how LINKEDIN helped him track and expand his voluminous contacts.

The nuts and bolts are:

You first create a free account, then fill out a profile of yourself and then explore the “find people” space to see which of your contacts is already in LINKEDIN.  Then you can ask them to to connect with you.  Once they do, they become your first-degree connections and their connections become part of your network, as “second degree” connections.

The connections of these second-degree folks become your “third-degree connections”.  All of this is done through the system.  As of now, I have a stack of connections, hundreds of second-degree connections and thousands of plus connections in my network. 

I can search my network and contact anyone on it, but the reason the system works is that I can only connect with my direct connections directly.  Everyone else has to be connected through the folks I know.  They hear only from people they already know directly.  So it’s basically friends - or acquaintances - making the initial connection.

Nowdays, when someone asks me for a contact, that is not a BNI member, I tell them to join LINKEDIN, connect with me there and search my contacts.  They use the system to send my contacts a message via me.  I then judiciously decide whether to forward the message or not.  I have declined to forward messages in some cases when the contact would not be appropriate. 

In the old days, prior to joining LINKEDIN, I would have just copied my contact.  I still do that, on occasion, with very good friends, but this way is better so that the contact can decide whether they want to respond, without the individual automatically getting hold of their e-mail address.
 
Good luck with your LINKEDIN connection.

Alex Kahl's example of a Linkedin button (add yours to your website):