Marc: Well that I’m sure that’s what LinkedIn says and thinks. But that is a severe problem and to be honest, you know, I have got people who said “Marc, you know, this is inappropriate, you know, don’t send – forward these kinds of introductions to me.”
That‘s it. It only happens once or twice for four or five years in general. I don’t find it to be a problem and that’s why I have some standards in terms of the kinds of messages that I cross, but I think fundamentally – and I hope you agree – you know, my role as a introduction forwarder, is not to be a filter it’s – you know, I find it presumptuous that I should know what you as the recipient are looking forward to, or what kind of situation you’re in, you know, and I – I’m not going to speak to that, what I will do is to ensure that the request is a professional and appropriate one.
But aside from that, you know, I don’t know where you’re at and what kind of introduction you accept, so therefore I do place, you know, large part of the onus on the recipient to decide for themselves, whether or not it’s a reasonable request, whether they’re going to accept it or not. Dave: I agree with you, I think what we’re talking about is: are you the pimp or the whore? (laughs)
Marc: (laughs) Well, that’s it.
Dave: Since you’re already said you’re a prostitute. (laughs)
Marc: (laughs) Well, you know, maybe we need a little bit of Facebook there where, you know, instead of zombies and werewolves, we’re looking pimps and whores, I love that.
Dave: (laughs)
Marc: What I will add is one of the new features that we have on mylinkedin500.com, which is our listing to top LinkedIn networkers, and it was originally founded for people who have more than five connections like you and myself, but now, you know, we have probably 1,200 people in the listing and some of them have five connections and some of them have 20,000.
So anyone can use it, but one of the things we’ve done is to allow people to, you know, literally complain about people for whom, you know, there is inappropriate LinkedIn behaviour. And I kind of looked at that in terms of, you know, who are – where does it make sense or, you know, me as a third party then say, you know, you’re a bad boy.
One of those areas is if you’re an open networker, and you’re reporting a spam or using an Idontknow on an invitation from an open networker. And there are some cases where I think people are just being plain abusive to other members and so what we are doing – and it’s more and more of a punitive action – is if you do get reported, we have our suspension list and we will ensure that your listing as on mylinkedin500 isn’t displayed to people or is not freely made available over our open networker list.
And so, you know, we’re doing our little bit to try to maintain a professional and an ethical community. But aside from that I really – and that’s kind of the difficultly of LinkedIn – is you’re absolutely right, I mean, there are people who do go over the bounds of, you know, what’s appropriate behaviour in the community and there’s no way to record that, I mean, you can have recommendations, but there’s no, you know, there’s no similar category for disses or, you know, thumbs up and or thumbs down on recommending people and, you know there’s no way to report…
Dave: So do you find… yeah I have a question for you…
Marc: Go ahead.
Dave: Do you find…
Marc: Yeah.
Dave:…in an interesting conundrum that you’re upset that LinkedIn penalized you for you doing behaviour that they felt was unacceptable and yet here you are running your own linkedin500 site and that you penalized people for doing behaviour that you believe is unacceptable on the same service? You see any problems with that or is that something (unintelligible)…
Marc: (laughs) Well, you know, the irony is not lost on me and, you know, I – it’s – I had my own private laugh over that a month ago when I developed my own program. You know, the bottom line is clearly whenever you have any kind system here which imbued – which provides a service – it can and will be abused and there has to be a way to monitor community service and, you know, LinkedIn, you know, I will say that for the most part, I think LinkedIn’s policies are reasonable.I mean I’ve been in – had issues with them in the past and, you know, for example they might freeze your account, but if you get back to them and say you’ll be a good boy, they’ll unfreeze it.
Sometimes they’ll just give you a warning in general, you know, they’re – I think pretty sensitive to allow you to use or quickly activate your account and so you know, I give them credit for that, although clearly the case where my account was suspended for a few weeks, you know, primarily was predicated on the fact that their attorney got involved and I know in a lot of cases once that happens it’s really out of the hands of customer service and there’s not much they can do about it.
Dave: Right.
Marc: Well, good well let me give a last call out to our listening audience, whether they’re listening live or chatting, I noticed we’re having some problems with the chatting interface on our Now Live platform so we haven’t had the comments that we normally have, but in any case, we’re talking to super blogger, Dave Taylor and askdavetaylor.com and feel free to call or submit your questions via the chat. Dave, have you used LinkedIn Answers and what do you think that relatively recent service?
Dave: Don’t really have much experience with it. As far as I can tell, the whole Q&A Schick is something that every site in the world wants to get involved with because it’s an easy way to have lots of, if you will, traffic generating pages. But the questions that I have seen in my e-mail that my network has submitted, they are at best mundane and certainly not sufficiently interesting that I’m going to spend the time to go and answer it on their site, so I don’t know – I mean I’m sure I’m in the minority because in a lot of ways my job professionally is to answer questions on my website so, I think I’m probably a particularly discerning audience for that sort of thing.
Marc: Well that is very interesting. I mean you’re absolutely right I mean with 17 million members now, clearly only a tiny minority of people are using it, but there is an active – in any case, there’s an active group who both uses, and often times, answers those question.And it can be useful, and I find the same thing that you have in terms of how we support other LinkedIn users, there’s, you know, a lot of different communities and there’s a lot of different ways that we do it and some people already have blogs like yourself, obviously, I have my show, we have our new top link discussion group, and, you know, that’s just one of many areas.
A lot of people are using it for marketing and, you know, I – my philosophy there that I’m evolving is if I’m going to spend time to specially answer or prepare a question that has to do with LinkedIn – if I’m going to spend the half an hour or an hour of my time, you know, I’ll spend an extra minute or two, to publish that in different areas to help people, so that may mean submitting it to a discussion group, hosting it on my wiki.
And I’m starting increasingly and also post it on LinkedIn Answers just, you know, if you’re going to help people, the more people that you can help the better. So I look at it as an alternative – not alternative, but another form of distribution in terms of, if you’re developing content like you and I do, another way to distribute it, and reach more people in a different way. So good, well we are getting near the end of the hour here Dave, I appreciate your – chatting with us for a while here. Why don’t we kind of wrap up and let me ask you, you know, what are your top three recommendations for LinkedIn users to get the most use out of the service and to be successful in their business?
Dave: Well the first one is – and this is something that I’ve been doing for a couple of years now – is that whenever you meet someone and get their business card, go back to your office and invite them to connect to you on LinkedIn.And make sure you have a specific message on that invitation that says “great meeting you at the trade show last week in Vegas, let’s connect here.”
And, I mean, I do that – I’ll send out hundreds of requests a year, from people that I’ve met and, you know, a lot people aren’t on LinkedIn, or don’t have a clue, or never respond, but I definitely grow my network with high-quality people by doing that, so that’s tip number one.
Tip number two is do forward requests and introductions that come through you, and do it in a timely manner but write a good little intro, I mean you know, I think that people like you Marc, no offense but I think that you’re sort of an outlier in terms of usage and for most people they’re probably going to get maybe a couple of those a month, and, you know, the extra 60 seconds will really be appreciated by the person whose going to receive that request for introduction and then they will remember you as someone who’s helping them be successful and that’s always good.
And then thirdly, let’s see… make sure you have an externally visible URL for your LinkedIn profile and don’t be shy about making that available even putting it – I’ve seen that on people’s business cards. It’s a great way for you again to memorialize, to have people, you know, remember the connection that you have, and then they become part of your network so they become available to you down the road – to make yourself more successful. So those are my three. And I’m sticking…
Marc: Those are all fantastic tips and recommendations, so Dave I want to thank you again, and it’s been my pleasure talking with you and, you know, we’re going to move on to our final segment here in just a second. Let me play our little standard segway here… (music)
Marc: Now we’ve reached almost the end of our show here, on LinkedIn Live: WhosYourDaddy I want to thank our callers and listeners for joining us, again following up on last week’s show, we recommend – we’re looking for LinkedIn heroes, so these can be people who are local hubs – they can be people in a profession, in a business, in a industry who are well-known and well-connected people.These can be people who are investing their time and their resources to support other LinkedIn users if you see an outstanding act to support anyone in a LinkedIn community or to support perhaps, a non-profit group, you know, we want to hear about it.
We want to interview them, and help them get publicity for their efforts, whether it’s local community, or a charity or non-profit group. So go to our webpage at whosyourdaddyshow.com and send us an e-mail with your recommendations, whether you would like to nominate yourself or someone that you’ve seen to be on our show and to recognize them as a LinkedIn hero.
I know I speak for Heidi who unfortunately left the show in midway to – when I say we appreciate your listening and participating in our show – we can’t do it without you. This is the last show of the year for us so we wish the very best holidays to our audience.And we’ll be coming back to you in January. Make sure you’re on our mailing lists so again, if you’re at whosyourdaddyshow.com you can join our mailing list as well as our discussion groups and we’ll give you some advance notice there about who are our upcoming guests are.
As well as to allow you participate after the show in the discussion, so we thank you again and have a wonderful holiday season. We’ll be back to you in January with new, wonderful speakers again, I want to thank Dave Taylor of askdavetaylor.com who is our special guest for today our music is from Tarnia and you can find links to their – both of their LinkedIn profiles, as well as Tarnia’s music and Dave’s blog on our website at whosyourdaddyshow.com so over and out and we’re going to end this show with a little bit more music from Tarnia
Back to Dave Taylor Part 4
linkln is nice.