LinkedIn - Thrice Asked, and joined.
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2008-12-30 08:30:31 - Graham EllisI admit it - I was something of a cynic when I got my first invite to join LinkedIn; I saw it as yet another idea / directory and felt that - although I should be networking - there's a limit to the number of profiles I can maintain, and to the amount of information I should put out there to fade, gently, out of date. But LinkedIn references keep coming up and a handful of people have invited me to join.
When telling the story of how we decided to write our first course at Well House Consultants (it was a Perl course), I describe how I told the first person who asked "look - that's a piece of free software, so who's going to pay for a course?". I told the second person that we weren't offering such a course. And to the third person I said "I keep telling people - there's no demand" ... and a bolt from the blue told me that there WAS a demand - I had three people proving it. Twelve years later, I can tell you that for every three people who ask you about a product that you don't advertise, there will be another thirty who are interested in the product but wouldn't even THINK of asking. And so we wrote our first course ... and Well House Consultants has move from being a £100 'shell' company to something much bigger - training courses, a hotel, meeting rooms, with an operation that's open from 06:30 to 22:00 through the week and a team of staff.
So ... when LinkedIn came up again (it's rather more than three times now!) this morning, I jumped in - took the plunge and entered my details. It does strike me as a system with excellent potential for keeping in touch / getting back in touch with long lost contacts, and for finding new people with whom we share aims and views, with whom we can exchange information, and perhaps work with or train to our mutual benefit.
If YOU are already a LinkedIn member, please visit my public page and feel free to contact me / add me to your connections. I'm not going to start sending round whole loads of invites to everyone in my mail box (I have the uneasy feeling that this would be too closely akin to spamming!) ... but I would welcome a build up of some connections.
If you are NOT already a LinkedIn member, you can still visit that public page, and you'll find you're getting invited to join, like I have just done. And I've joined at the free level; I expect I'll stick to that, but ... who knows, this may turn out to be the one in a hundred of those connections that becomes rather more.