Relationships Take Time 6
(October 18, 2007) The
ongoing LinkedIn experiment has made me notice several things.
- A connection without a relationship
(I think we call it sourcing these days) is not very interesting.
LinkedIn is an opportunity engine. You get out of it what you put
into it.
- There are really several categories
of people you know
- Close Friends
- Family
- Daily Business Associates
- Very Old Friends
- Very Old Business Associates
- People you want to know better
- People who know you better than you know them
- People who you know better than they know you
Each of these categories ought to be managed discretely. On linked
in, you are either in or out. The real work in pipeline style
recruiting is moving people through a couple of these categories.
Linked in is just awful about managing the nuances of a real
network. It requires you to keep all the subtlety in your head.
- LinkedIn gives you tools and then
punishes you for using them. I ran the outlook tool against my
email. Three of the 300 people in the list that LinkedIn generated
for me said they'd never heard of me. Linked in now gives me a
special warning everythime I make an invitation. Like Harry Joiner
noticed, these systems are not very good at some forms of internal
consistency.
- It's very empowering to spend a
little time building a network on linked in. Lots of nice feedback
from lots of nice people. It's much, much harder to have a plan and
make the network you build work for everyone in it.
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