Every few days one of these messages pops into my inbox. No, no, I'm not talking about offers of enhanced lovemaking or free money from Dr. Istaljfizh of Nigeria! I'm talking about an invitation to join the network.
The network in question is the Linkedin Network. Linkedin is a professional social networking site. Or, as it prefers to describe itself: "an online network of more than 14 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries."
It is an interesting concept, founded by a PayPal VP, that applies the idea of six degrees of separation. Once you join the network, you can ultimately connect to other people who can help you with work, careers, jobs, and so on.
The first thing you do is create a profile about yourself. Next, you invite people you know to join your Linkedin network and they also invite you in. Together, people create circles of professional connections.
From these connections, you can jump to thousands upon thousands of people. For example, suppose I want to meet someone who handles marketing for a guitar company. I could dig through websites, find a name, and do a cold call contact. Maybe I'll get through.
Or, I can drop into Linkedin, search through functional and industry categories, find a good point of contact, and ask for an introduction to Guitar-guru. Suddenly, I'm not some cold call. Instead I'm a someone introduced through a known network.
This connection tool can be used in many ways. For example, earlier this month, the Obama presidential campaign gained a bit of ink by using Linkedin to reach out to entrepreneurs and small business owners. As trade publication InfoWorld reported on Sept 12:
"Obama is posting several questions to LinkedIn's Answers service, which was launched earlier this year to let members ask questions of, and receive quick answers from, fellow users of the site. Obama's first post this morning asked users how the next president can help small businesses and entrepreneurs thrive. The post had elicited more than 200 responses after three hours on the site."
It is the old word of mouth injected with pixels. Or a virtualized networking event. It's a gathering place to do business with people we know. Well, at least with people who know people who know people we know!
And, it seems, it is something of competition as well. Which brings me back to my own inbox.
Lots of people have sent me invitations to join their network. I usually respond to them. And as I began this response process, I also began to notice that a sort of collection race was underway.
In the summary page of people on the site, are three little icons. One shows your degree of separation from this person. The number 1 means you directly know each other. The number 2 means you both know someone in common. And so on.
A second icon shows the number of recommendations you have from other people in the network.
And the third - ah, the third - this one says how many people are in your direct network. This is the professional's equivalent of how many friends you have or how fat your rolodex is.
Having a big number next to that third icon is a badge of pride. It would seem that we're right back in eighth grade, all vying for most-popular-kid awards!
How many times have you been reminded that it isn't what you know that matters, but who you know that counts? With social networking apps for the professional side of us, those of us from, uhm, less extensive personal backgrounds, have an online tool for playing catch up. Or for finding out how already caught up we might be with out realizing it.
A fun thing to do with the Linkedin site is to simply search on some random category of people and marvel at how many connections you might already have.
I did a search on "guitar" - which is not an area that I thought I had many connections in or even much knowledge of. Turns out I'm three connections from the lead programmer on Guitar Hero and the editor of Guitar World Online and the national sales manager of Bernie Rico Jr. Guitars, and the VP of Strategic Development at Guitar Center, Inc. Who knew?
The world is a small place and with applications like Linkedin it grows smaller every day.
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