Back in January, Guy Kawasaki wrote a blog post about the top ten (or eleven, or thirteen) reasons to use LinkedIn. For those who have never heard of the service, LinkedIn is a social networking site which allows you to maintain a list of your various contacts online. Those contacts in turn maintain their contacts, etc, etc. The ultimate goal is to create a network of trusted relationships which, conceivably, would allow you to meet new people through a chain of trusted introductions.Guy came up with a number of other uses for LinkedIn which were compelling enough for me to revive my long-dormant account on the service. In particular, I liked some of his ideas about using your LinkedIn profile to improve your website's standing in search engine results.
So, this evening I spent time entering in my contacts. LinkedIn actually makes this pretty easy by allowing you to import your contact lists from a variety of popular email programs, both web-based and desktop. Ironically for me, the one glaring exception was my preferred mail client, Thunderbird. Not a huge deal for me, as I was able to make the necessary conversion to trick LinkedIn think that my address book came from MS Outlook instead. Annoying, but certainly not a fatal flaw.
Tomorrow I'll try to spend some time editing the profile using some of the tricks and tips that Guy gave out in a later post. I'll let you know how it goes.
So, are you on LinkedIn? What do you think of the service?
Yes, and I haven't decided, but I did decide to revive my long-dormant use. I've gotten a bunch (well, 3 or 4) of link requests from people I don't know. I have no idea why they're requesting to link to me. They appear to be 3 links away, so I can see my link(s) that link to their link(s), but I don't know who the in-between link(s) are. I generally decline the link, but it's still a nuisance.
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