Reinke Faces Life

FROM AN EMAIL ABOUT LINKEDIN

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>Second, what is the 5 strikes and you’re locked rule that you refer to below?

LinkedIn has a policy, about a year old, that if five people that you invite say “Don’t know”, you’re account is locked out. Depending upon how well you kowtow to “customer (dis)service”, they will unlock you. A second offense, and you may not be unlocked.

>Third, I like your “I am not accepting your request ..”

Contrary to the impression my large count gives, I am NOT an open networker. (I run an alumni ezine and have been “in transition” five times and ran a networking group.) I try to only connect with kindred spirits.

>Speaking of LinkedIn, I had an interesting conversation with a recruiter last week on the topic of having recruiters as LinkedIn connections.

I’d think that was “interesting” because recruiters have a completely different set of objectives than real people.

> I told her my take on how I see it being a one-way street (at least from a career networking point of view)

I’m not so sure I agree with you. LinkedIn for seekers allows one to find and be found.

>and she basically agreed as she said “I would never put my clients in my linkedin connections”.

Sure, because she can’t compete with all the recruiters out their chasing a diminishing world of hiring managers and job seekers. If I can id someone who needs my brand of poison then why should they hire a recruiter to find me. Or visa versa.

There’s a lot of sleeze tactics on LinkedIn.

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What is a personalized LinkedIn url?

Personalizing your LinkedIn url allow you to customize the web address of your LinkedIn public profile. You can include this personalized LinkedIn url in the signature of emails you send, post it on other web sites, or whatever. (Put it on your resume?) You “personalize” it by getting to the “Edit My Public Profile” page. Then choose what will appear after the last slash in www.linkedin.com/in/ “at least five letters”! “first come, first served”! “one to a user”!

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At the end of the first week: (for all contacts older than one month)

%Dead 0.0720
%Unresponding 0.6490
%MyEmployer 0.0719
%HeadHunters 0.0182

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My original focus was on “breakage”. But at a little more than 5%, that’s not terrible. I am attempting to “reach around” the break. That’s how I describe sending an InMail directly to a contact of the “broken contact”.

Since my first email only induced about 30% to respond, I’ll have to figure out a better approach.

Sigh. Always more to do!

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In building your LinkedIn circle of connections, it appears wise to have some organized system of tracking them from the beginning. Lest, awhile down the road, you WILL be asked “How do I know you?”. Sometimes that’s a tough question. Unless you have anticipated it.

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FROM A LINKEDIN QUESTION, MY ANSWER:

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I recently started a new job. How can I send an update message in to all of my LinkedIn connections letting them know?

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I’d suggest going the extra mile and send each person a personalized email.

It can be identical in content but you’ll find that individual messages get through spam filter easier.

Also, if by chance a email address is out of date — not likely that would ever happen with LinkedIn-ites — my current number of bum address is 7% — you’ll have some personalized text to resolve it. Sometimes bounces don’t really give you enough to go on.

You can even repay the Universe for your good fortune by asking if they need you help.

If you use Microsoft Word, Exce, and Outlook, it’s pretty easy to do a merge. I download LinkedIn contacts into an XLS sheet. Spruce up the name field. Create a message in Word. Then run a merge. It’ll stuff them in your Outlook email outbox and they ship out on the next send receive.

All pretty easy to do.

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You can subdivided you contacts into “panels” by the first letter of their last name. (It’s useful for may things. Days Outstanding measurement. Balancing what LinkedIn thinks you have versus what you have in Outlook.)

I have a little trick for finding out how many of a certain letter LinkedIn has. If you go to the “contacts” screen in LinkedIn and tap on the letter in the index, then up at the top is “showing xxx of yyyy connections”. And there is your check total. It’s better than trying to count, or print to count.

fwiw

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In my LinkedIn Outlook folder, I have 1109 contacts. In LinkedIn, I have 1100. Why the discrepancy?

And, it’s not easy to figure it out.

One can count until you’re bleary eyed. But it’s like counting sheep, it’ll put you to sleep.

And, is it an “activity trap” type of activity? Or, does it lead to something useful?

Don’t know.

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FROM AN EMAIL TO A LINKEDIN CONTACT WHO HAD BEEN “POUNDED”:

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FYI Your profile has been sent to the “dog pound” by LinkedIn. I think you need to take some action on that, but I don’t know what to tell you. It’s my understanding that you will not, repeat NOT, be found in any LinkedIn searches if you’ve been “pounded”. So right away, I think you have a problem. It’s my again my understanding that LinkedIn has done this to anyone who has their email, or other strange characters in their name field. The hard part is only YOUR first level connections can see this “pounding”, and tell you about it. Others that I have told, have “fixed” the problem and about a week later were “un-pounded”. Please advise if, after you “fix” it, you want me to check for you again.

Fjohn

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AND HERE”S WHERE I FIRST HEARD ABOUT IT:

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Is Your Profile Ending Up In The Linkedin Dog Pound?
Posted by: “Vincent Wright”
Tue Nov 7, 2006 10:01 pm (PST)

Because of the way the symbol for it is pronounced, I think of the “#”
Section of Linkedin’s Remove Connections as “The Dog Pound” . (Some may
think this a good name for certain types of profiles. :-))

In case you’re not familiar with the “#” Section on Linkedin, it’s located
at the end of the alphabetized list of your contacts at:
http://www.linkedin.com/connections?displayBreakConnections

You and I cannot place any contacts in this area. Profiles are assigned
there by Linkedin’s contact algorithm based on certain types of elements
being present in the name field – I believe.

Food For Thought: Some people may use this as a way to clean up “weak”
connections en masse. If this happens, your profile may unintentionally be
removed even by a connection who may know you pretty well as a “strong”
connection.

—
Thanks!
Vincent Wright
Chief Encouragement Officer
www.VincentWright.com

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A LinkedIn Question
by Rob Richard
Entrepreneur & IT Consultant

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Has LinkedIn missed the boat?

Is it me or does LinkedIn seem stagnant; complacent? I’ve not seen any new features in eons, and it really is getting rather old.

With the recent and sizeable cash infusion to facebook from Microsoft ($250 million worth!), what is LinkedIn’s response? There are so many things that could enhance the service. Open it up to developers just as facebook has. I think facebook is more young-people / early adopter centric, but LinkedIn could at least learn a lesson from them and stake their claim in the business and professional networking sites by adding more stickiness.

On more than one occasion I’ve sent suggestions on how to improve the site and its offerings and never heard anything in return. Now as a web entrepreneur, if I have people giving me free suggestions on how to make it more useful, I’d listen. So the question I ask is: “Has LinkedIn missed the boat?”

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A very tough question.

I personally am not sure of the benefits versus costs of LinkedIn. It may well be an “activity trap” where effort far exceeds results. I think that they have a tiger by the tail.

I haven’t seen anything better.

Facebook came the closest with it’s using college email addresses to define “networks” and with some widespread adoption. But they were aiming at a different value equation.

I think LinkedIn’s poor (in some case non-existent) customer service, it’s new five “idontknows” lockout, and the MONUMENTAL blunder about hassling the LinkedIn affinity groups like LinkedInNewYork and all of Vincent Wright’s efforts is indicative of their “cluelessness”.

Have they missed the boat? No!

Have they failed to capture the wave? Yes!

If Amazon, Ebay, the Ron Paul Presidential run, and other web20 successes taught us anything, it should be that within a very well defined meme let the users surprise you with their energy. And, then hang on tight.

I suggested eons ago, that LinkedIn give me three fields for each of my contacts. One for a private note, one for a note visible only to them, and one was a “last contact date”. The private note was for my use to trigger my memory or record an important fact.The mutually visible note would be for me to record how I knew the person or what I owed them. The date was so I could produce a “days outstanding” metric and sort a “make contact list” by age. NEVER, never, never heard anything back on the idea. It showed me that they weren’t serious about servicing my needs. Only their own.

Later when they hassled the user groups, I knew they had NO CLUE about making LinkedIn a success from my point of view.

So, “No, they haven’t missed the boat” only because there is NO competition to jump to.

imho.

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Arghh! This is annoying. I have ten discrepancies between what I show and what LinkedIn has. And, I didn’t even start reconciling what Outlook has.

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(1) Not easy to do.

(2) I watch my LinkedIn-ites pretty carefully, I have an excel spreadsheet that use to track. However many adjustments are needed to reconcile.

(3) In my spreadsheet, I have a column that takes the first character of the last name with the formula =UPPER(LEFT(celladdr,1)). That establishes what I call a panel.

(4) A separate sheet in the workbook creates a 1 in the A column if the panel cell is an “A”. B column tests B. and so on until Z. Row and column summaries look for errors.

(5) I hate when on LinkedIn people silently leave. I don’t want to keep them if they don’t want to be linked, but I would like to know that they have left. This is one of my gripes with LinkedIn. How do you handle the “leavers”?

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FROM AN LINKEDIN CONTACT’S EMAIL

>the connections you made from that MySQL blast that put the recipients in the cc field instead of the bcc field

Sure, while I haven’t chatted with him yet this year, I know he had two LinkedIn accounts at one time. Wonder if he ever had them merged?

That’s a interesting question.

I don’t know how many contacts I picked up that way. I do know that my “average days outstanding is 231. And my target for LinkedIn contacts is 180.

So I’m glad you asked.

I feel that I have identified about 5% of my contacts that are “dead”. It probably makes sense to prune the deadwood.

Maybe I should have a “census” of biblical proportions? Unlike Herord’s, contacts wouldn’t have to return to their birth city. Just reply to an email. Seems like a good idea.

How do you manage your LinkedIn connections?

Or, any connections?

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November 1, 2007

180 pings out, 6 dead, 50 live

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