LinkedIn: Not your Teenager’s MySpace
By Chon Nguyen
If you have a teenager and you haven’t heard of MySpace, ask their
friends and they’ll tell you about it. I’ve written before about social
networks and how they are all the rage with the teenage crowd. Now
they’re courting the business set.
Social networks were originally designed to move your offline
relationships online so that you can better communicate with your peers.
Over time, they evolved into much more complex systems that allow you to
play games with your friends, and find new friendships based on location
or interests. One of the most popular features of the sites is their
ability to post photos and allow users to identify people who are in them so that they are
searchable by others. Because of this unique feature, Facebook has
become one of the largest online photo sharing sites on the Internet.
For an adult, most features of traditional social networking sites
aren’t too interesting. There is, however, a social network geared
towards professionals with great features that are useful to its
demographic. It’s called LinkedIn and it’s designed to create and build
professional relationships.
The first time you visit the site, you fill out information about
yourself. It asks your education, previous employers, and other details
that can help the system make connections to people you might possibly
know. You can even upload your Outlook address book or link to an online
e-mail system, like Hotmail or Gmail, so that you can find relationships
with people that you e-mail frequently.
The system then mines this data to find people to whom you’re connected
and adds them to your “network.” It will also display people you might
know based on the information that you have entered. This is a great
feature for finding people with whom you haven’t talked in awhile. My
buddy found college friends and was able to reconnect with his old
fraternity brothers with whom he had lost touch. This was possible
because users keep their information current.
This is all great and fun, but it has a real benefit. Now that your
network is built, you can use it to build contacts with people you might
not otherwise be able to approach. I’m on LinkedIn and my customers have
posted recommendations for my company. If someone sees that someone in
their network has recommended my company, that person would be much more
likely to use my company’s services because they trust that person.
Aside from the recommendations and networking, the site also focuses
heavily on the job search process. When you are searching for jobs,
LinkedIn also runs a search on your network to show you people that you
know (directly or via your network). This enables you to contact a
potential influencer. For example, if you see that The Home Shopping
Network is hiring and notice that one of your contacts is two
“connections” away from a vice president, you can approach your
connections to ask for an introduction.
So what are you waiting for? Start building your network! There are so
many different ways to find people that I’m sure you will quickly find
old school friends or work colleagues. Link in and start connecting with
people. You know what they say: it’s all about who you know!
Chon Nguyen is a tech troubleshooter and owner of Digital Aspire at
www.digitalaspire.com.
