Dave: I mean there’s lots of interesting things that can be done once LinkedIn says “We don’t have to own every line of code.
Marc: Well absolutely and that’s going to be a fine line, I think that LinkedIn will have in terms of maintaining true to the LinkedIn philosophy of strong connections and maintaining close control over personal information and privacy while at the same time opening up to business services that are going to be useful as opposed to the explosion of toys that you see on Facebook.
I’m a little bit pessimistic frankly you know given LinkedIn tensions to really control their network and the users and the information on the network. I’m pessimistic that they’re going to open it up in a way that allows people to do innovative and interested things.
But you know definitely, I’ll keep my mind open and hope for the best. And we’ll see where that – where that turns. Dave let me turn to a slightly different area, since you’ve been writing about LinkedIn, and you’ve been a veteran user as well as an open networker, what are some of the tips that you can give our audience in terms of how to more effectively use LinkedIn or you know features or services of LinkedIn that you might think are under appreciated and that you enormously enjoy and value?
Dave: Well I’d have to say that the first thing I would strongly recommend everybody everybody is when you are going to invite someone to connect to you on LinkedIn, or if you’re going to send a contact to them. Spend the extra 90 seconds, find out something about them and make sure you send them a personalized query.
When I get I mean, this is just absolute truths, when I get requests to connect to people and it’s the generic template, I am far far more likely to reject it. But if someone says “Met you at a trade show” or “Love your blog” or “Heard you on Marc’s radio program” then you know what, that’s a really really good chance that I’ll approve that connections. Because I know at least you’ve done the tiniest bit of homework. Do you have the same experience Marc?
Marc: Well Dave, and I’m an unabashed whore so I – you know, frankly I get 15 to 20 invitation requests a day and you know it’s supposed to be a practical manner in terms of, you know, spending the time to investigate people who contact me, as well as many of my invitations are one’s that really, you know really I’m inviting people to connect to me, so I created a custom URL, which is invite.mylinkdaddy.com which actually sends you to default invitation page.
And you know really my expectation is that if you used that I’m already giving you implicit permission to send me an invitation.
And you don’t really need to customize it. And you know other people may use that kind of “Quick link” invitation is the name some of us has given it. They might have used it a little bit differently, but – so as a result I expect and accept that many of the invitations that I have are pretty generic and I personally don’t have any criteria in terms of which ones to accept or not to accept, just as long as they’re, you know, clearly business oriented invitations.
Dave: Right now what about request to forward introductions and such?
Marc: I- you know that’s very interesting- about once every six months or a bit or so. I get someone who gets kind of upset. Because I actually do reject them every now and then. So I probably forward about 95% of them. The rules that I use to accept to forward introductions is – I will forward it with the following exceptions if: A. It’s not professional. You know the reality is this is a business network and people should provide some level of respect and courtesy to other people who they don’t know.
And because I have such a large network in most cases I don’t know them either, so I do require people to not just send “Hey, you know connect to me, please send me an email” you know, I expect just like if you were to make an introduction to someone you don’t know through email – through email or even through snail mail that you would write a professional letter.
And so that’s one criteria the other is, using the correct category, and you know, LinkedIn makes it difficult really to understand the criteria of people of – the introductions they accept, but there’s one exception and that is that people can specify what kinds of messages they’re open to, for example if they’re open to career opportunities or not.
And so I do ask that people pay attention to and follow that – use the right categories. But that’s really about it for the most part. What about yourself?
Dave: I actually find it kind of interesting that I get surprisingly few requests to forward introductions, because I mean I do have an extended network of multiple million people. But when I do you know, I’m very cognizant of the fact, that if I forward an introduction to you for example. That’s going to reflect on me.
So that introduction better be by someone who’s written something coherent and it’s logical that they would connect to this third party, and that if I forward them along. That number one – that I’m going to be very honest, I would either say you know, “Marc’s a good friend, and anything he’s doing is going to be cool” or I might say “Not really sure much about this guy, I’ll let make your own decisions.”
I almost always do forward things but I do really hope that people would spend the extra few minutes to write a decent introduction to make sure that they’re you know sending a query that’s as you say is consistent with what this person has said that they’re willing to accept.
Marc: Well that’s interesting I think your philosophy is probably the more common one in LinkedIn. Like anything else you’re going to find a spectrum and there are people on LinkedIn who literally forward anything.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are people who are very closed in terms of accepting or forwarding introductions and you know won’t even forward anything that’s more than two degrees a way.
But I think your attitude is probably a typical -most people on my own end – I generally forward about 10 to 15 introductions a day. Not to say that I do it everyday, but at least twice a week. And as a result it makes it pretty onerous and – to customise my forwarding introduction so I don’t do that and I don’t go to the extra step that you go to. But I certainly appreciate people who do.
Dave: Right now, I just want to ask you in that same vein, if someone were to contact you and say you forwarded this guy to me and he’s like some psycho stalker, or just a loser or whatever would you then remember and not forward more things to that person, or would just blow them off?
Marc: Well you know, that is a terrific question and I think that’s one of the weaknesses of LinkedIn is there’s no way qualitatively to you know annotate or remember important information about your connections or other members, and you know that is a problem…there’s been a few…
Dave: Yeah yeah – I was going to say I think their response to would be, “Well you should only have 20 or 30 contacts, so you should be able to remember all these people, because they’re all your closest friends and colleagues.
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