Marc: Why don’t we take a few calls or perhaps if people want to chat prior to getting Dave on the line, we see a few guests? Dave is saying his non-business account seems to be the same. So his homepage hasn’t changed yet.
It’s officially in beta. And if you want to go to the URL for it, it is www.linkedin.com/?beta and that actually will take you to your beta homepage. And as I said for some people it’s already been integrated into their regular homepage, for others it’s not.
You may have to go to the beta and who knows, I mean maybe they are looking at your cookie and if you’ve been at it once, then you will automatically be seeing the beta there. There doesn’t seem to be anyway to toggle it on or off.
In any case that’s what’s going on. We are going to take your calls for the next minute or two if anyone wants to join us, otherwise we will be talking to Mr Dave Taylor of Mr Ask Dave Taylor.
So Heidi how is your New Orleans Saints doing?
Heidi: Ah they clobbered the Atlanta Falcons on Monday night. Thank you very much. Again, twice in the season now. Atlanta’s very (unintelligible).
Marc: That’s picking on the weak link of the group.
Heidi: Well you know it’s good for the team and now we’ve got to come back strong and be back in the Dome on Sunday. Looking for an exciting game to happen there. Definitely looking forward to it.
Marc: Well terrific. First let me give a few credits.
The opening music that you heard is from the artist Tarnia and she is in the United Kingdom and it’s her song “Sell it to my heart”. If you go to our website at WhosYourDaddyShow.com and click on the link on our music page, you’ll find a few of the artists that we feature on our show as well as free MP3 downloads.
So please enjoy the music, I play and listened to and recommend so it’s really good stuff and again the music there is free so you can’t beat it. So that is Tarnia. And we will be playing a little bit more of her songs later. And also I want to thank our transcript provider and Wilson of Futuregen.
And we do appreciate their transcripts. If you again go to our show site at WhosYourDaddyShow.com you’ll have links both to past shows that we’ve done as well as transcripts. And with that let me introduce Dave Taylor.
Dave is super blogger at askdavetaylor.com and wrote a lot about LinkedIn and I was honoured to have him recently bring up his view point which supported my concern about my own suspension a few weeks ago which is a pretty shabby way to treat your business customers.
And Dave let me – Dave are you there?
Dave: Yeah I hope so.
Marc: There you go. Well (unintelligible). Dave where are you calling from?
Dave: Beautiful snowy Boulder Colorado.
Marc: Oh how lovely. That’s terrific. So I assume the skiing season has already started in full force there?
Dave: Finally, yup it’s only been in the last week or so that they’ve been able to stop the man made stuff. But yeah, everyone’s very happy around town now.
Marc: Well good. So Dave invites everybody to join him in Boulder and I’ll actually give a shout out to my buddy Mike O’neal who runs Integrated Alliances in Denver which is a very active networking group with LinkedIn workshops and seminars in Denver and Boulder.
And Dave do you know Mike?
Dave: Oh yeah. Mike and I know each other well. He’s a good guy.
Marc: Yeah who doesn’t know Mike in Denver? So in any case Dave tell us a little bit about your own LinkedIn experience. How many connections do you have? When did you get started? And you know, give us an introduction to where you’re coming from in terms of how you use LinkedIn?
Dave: Right, well I’m one of those people that apparently LinkedIn doesn’t actually really like a whole lot – because I have over 500 connections. And the reason I say that is I think that the whole vision of the guys that are running LinkedIn is that there’s a certain way they want you to use the network.
And any other use is a violation of their philosophy at best, if not terms of service. And that is what intrigued me when you got the boot recently for a couple of weeks Marc, because I think that people that really get tool-making recognize that you make a tool and then you wait and see what people use it for.
And you know how do I use LinkedIn? Well honestly I don’t visit it very often – probably every couple of weeks I go in and check on who’s invited me to link to them. And I use it as a database- research database to find contacts – probably the same way you do.
So you know if I need to track down someone at a specific company then I’ll often go to LinkedIn and see if I can get an introduction so that I can (get) in to that company directly rather than having to go through the generic support or info page or something like that.
Marc: Well Dave you’ve written a number of articles on LinkedIn and I have to add I wasn’t quite sure of your philosophy – so it sounds like you’re one of our friendly open networkers there with so many connections. Do – I mean when someone sends you an invitation do you automatically accept it or do you check their profile or…?
Dave: I check their profile. Honestly, mostly I accept everyone except head hunters. I find that recruiters tend to be really annoying people to have in your network. Because I get lots and lots of email from them saying “Hey does anyone of my two and a half million people know someone who might be a good database programmer?”
And I just don’t have the bandwidth to deal with those sort of queries. So…
Marc: So you are not really active with making referrals for people looking for Java programmers in Bangalore India then?
Dave: I’m afraid that is not really my sweet spot man. (Indian accent)
Marc: Well I can understand that. Certainly I do find recruiters to be among the more aggressive marketers. And in many cases, sending certainly untargeted openings that have absolutely nothing to do with you in terms of your discipline, geography, or interest. So…and they’re…
Dave: Right I mean…
Marc: Yeah go ahead.
Dave: I was going to say, those are the kind of recruiters that in my experience aren’t as successful. The ones that are really successful are the ones that have the ability to keep track of the hundreds of people in their Rolodex. So that when they do get a query, they know the small subset of people that are most likely to “bear fruit” if you will, from a query.
So instead of them saying “Dear Everybody” they might say something like “Dear Marc, I know you run that radio show and I’m wondering if next show you could…”
You know and then you’re like “Oh they’re paying attention to me” and then that becomes a much more successful strategy.
Marc: Well that’s certainly good advice and you’re not alone. I know a number of people who make it a point to not connect to recruiters where there are some particularly aggressive recruiters who won’t go – mentioned here- but they have a particularly bad reputation for – a lot of people from the recruiter connecting rather indiscriminately and some people just don’t like the feel of that as well.
And you know, on the other hand, I’ll say I’m certain – I for one am certainly am connected to literally thousands of recruiters and it’s not like I’m receiving thousands of the emails each month. You know with jobs all over the world. So for the most part, I find recruiters – although some of them can be aggressive just like any member – can be pretty well behaved and in everybody’s experience and interest level certainly changes.
Can you share with us- you’ve written a number of articles about LinkedIn, can you share with us just you know a few of them or what your general experiences or you know, what you’re writing about?
Dave: Uh yeah, I mean much of what I write about on – I have two different busy blogs on my askdavetaylor.com blog that one I tend to be all Q&A tutorials. And on there I documented a number of things you can do on LinkedIn.
You know with step by step and screenshots and all that. And then other people at LinkedIn have certainly appreciated that. They’ve actually linked to some of my articles which is nice. So I’m on their radar screen.
And then on my other blog which is at intuitive.com/blog – on that one I’ve been writing on the philosophy of LinkedIn and really you know I spent a lot of my time thinking about social networking and how all these different sites work you know, Facebook and Myspace.
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