http://www.linkedin.com
(a social networking site for professionals)
The inet is expanding everything so fast that it's hard to keep up on everything. LinkedIn is a site (free! sort of!) in the social networking genre. Like MySpace is for kiddies of all ages, this purports to be a "networking" site for professionals.
It's networking … sort of. It's free … sort of.
It allows you to join up and put up a profile. That profile used to be visible only to "members". Since it's a free site, membership is kind of misleading. Now you can make your profile visible to the world. Mine is at:
Once you have joined, giving a "name", email address, and promise that they can never be held liable for anything, you can then invite people to join and be part of your "network". Sort of like MultiLevelMarketing but it's free. (They try and monetize it by getting you to pay to send lots of emails to strangers.) By judicious choice of your name, you can get your email address into it and people can find and contact you. Or put it in your short description.
I have written some suggestions about LinkedIn in the past on my blog.
So, now, you are all signed up, and you find out from various ways that I'm there. You can propose to me that because "we know and trust each other" (yeah right!) that we can do the LinkedIn version of the Vulcan Mind Meld. We can become "LinkedIn" "blood brothers", which allows you to look at my contact list and me to look at yours. You can then send a note to my contacts, which if I "bless", gets passed along.
That's what a LinkedIn user means by "look thru my contacts and see if there is someone that can help you". The implication is that they will forward your messages along.
You can search LinkedIn for say "AT&T" and, if someone who worked there or works there is registered with LinkedIn and put that in their employment history, it tells you all nine grazillion. If the person is within four hops of you (four degrees of separation), it will show you their description and you can seek a connect via "passing notes" over LinkedIn. If they are not, you can pay to send them an email if they allow it. It used to be FIVE hops but they tightened it down. It used to be unlimited communications but they tightened it down. There's no guarantee that the note will be passed along. There's no guarantee that it will move quickly (in fact it often dies of old age. There's no guarantees about anything in life so you roll the LinkedIn dice.
So that is LinkedIn. I think the jury is still out on it. I am not sure that it is as valuable as they would like everyone to believe. There are on it what I call "scalp hunters", who are running around making connections to have big numbers. They have no intention of carrying on an ONGOING conversation. They are the one night stand of LinkedIn. Do whatever they have to. Get you to do the Vulcan Mind Meld thing. Slam, bamm, thank you mam, and off they go. Never to be heard from again. I have been doing LinkedIn for two years now, and it is "different". It is FANTASTIC for identifying targets. As a networking resource, it's "useful".
So if we did the LinkedIn Vulcan Mind Meld, you could peruse my contacts for people that might be useful to chat with. That's what I often suggest to people. Because I don't know which one might be useful to you.
FAIWWYPFI FWIW IMHO YMMV
Hope this helps.
FjohnR
Yet Another Big Turkey
Reinke Faces Life 