Linking In

Well, I LinkedIn!

I linked in a while back when ISM stated they had “LinkedIn”; however I had never really looked at the site.

According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, LinkedIn (1) is a business oriented social networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003 (2) mainly used for professional networking. As of December 2007, its site traffic was 3.2 million visitors per month, up 485% from the end of 2006. (3) As of October 2008, it has more than 30 million registered users (4) spanning 150 industries.

For those of you who have not tried it:  http://www.linkedin.com

The purpose of the site is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business. The people in the list are called connections, users can invite anyone (whether a site user or not) to become a connection.

When registering you set up a profile. I entered Hagemeyer as an employer and Briggs-Weaver as a previous employer. I had 50 connections from Hagemeyer and 10 from Briggs-Weaver.

The list of connections can then be used in a number of ways:

A contact network is built up consisting of their direct connections, the connections of each of their connections (termed second degree connections) and also the connections of second degree connections (termed third degree connections). This can be used to gain an introduction to someone you wish to know through a mutual, trusted contact.

It can then be used to find jobs, people and business opportunities recommended by someone in one’s contact network.

Employers can list jobs and search for potential candidates.

Job seekers can review the profile of hiring managers and discover which of their existing contacts can introduce them.

The “gated-access approach” (where contact with any professional requires either a preexisting relationship or the intervention of a contact of theirs) is intended to build trust among the service’s users. LinkedIn participates in EU’s International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles.

I have spent a couple of hours looking at the LinkedIn website. You can get hooked.
The feature LinkedIn Answers, similar to Google Answers or Yahoo! Answers, allows users to ask questions for the community to answer. This feature is free. Questions are potentially business-oriented, and the identity of the people asking and answering questions is known.

The searchable LinkedIn Groups feature allows users to establish new business relationships by joining alumni, industry, or professional and other relevant groups.
I noticed three sites relating to ISM.

The newest LinkedIn feature is LinkedIn Polls.

Now this one is hard to believe. A mobile version of the site (http://m.linkedin.com)
was launched in February 2008 which gives access to a reduced feature set over a mobile phone. The mobile service is available in six languages:  Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish.

I really feel left out as most of my friends have iphones or Blackberries. They are always picking up information on their phones, where I have to wait to get to a computer.
I am outdated. I just can’t justify the expense. Wish I had a job that was important enough to have an iphone.

If you really have some time, look at some other sites with comparable features:
CareerBuilder.com; Facebook.com, Monster.com, Ryze, xing.com; Ziggs.com,
Yahoo! HotJobs.

I don’t know about you all, but I constantly use Wikipedia for information.
It is great, just look at what I found about LinkedIn. Did you know they even have a LinkedIn store with tee shirts?