For a New Etiquette of LinkedIn
Friday, January 13th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
Yesterday, what could be described as the first union of LinkedIn power networkers was created by Christian Mayaud, one of LinkedIn’s most connected users, and certainly its most articulate commentator. The LinkedIn Lions Forum was started among rising concerns that LinkedIn Corporation, the company that has custody of the eponymous network, was not letting power networkers grow and use their networks in ways they felt entitled to.
At the time of writing, 529 users had joined the group and 270 messages had been exchanged. The issue, masterfully presented in a recent interview with Christian Mayaud, is a complex one that deserves some explanation. What is at stake is the long term viability of LinkedIn as a tool for power networkers, and I believe that a new etiquette of social networking with LinkedIn is required for the network to remain as effective as it is today.
LinkedIn is a fantastic networking tool, but one that takes some time to really understand. Much like I did not understand blogging until very recently, I did not really understand LinkedIn the first time I joined the network almost three years ago as user number 52401 (there are over 4.6M users today). I accepted an invitation from some friend (sorry, I can’t remember who), invited others, and quickly forgot about it. Much like the very vast majority of LinkedIn users, I was what I call a passive user. Most LinkedIn users are passive users, never sent a request through the network, never will, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. They, together, make the bulk of the network and create a fantastic pool of resources that active users, and among them super active users — also known as power networkers — use to get all kinds of things done, such as finding a job, getting access to some expertise, or organizing a wedding.
Things started to change after I read a couple of books on networking, among them Keith Ferrazzi’s Never Eat Alone and Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, which taught me why 150 was the answer to everything, rather than 42. Once I got more familiar with some basic networking concepts, I went back to my LinkedIn account, started inviting more friends and work associates, and diligently forwarded as many relevant requests as I could, waiting for my time to come. Then, I started to send a couple of requests on my own, some of which turned into pretty amazing success stories that convinced me that there was something special about social networking in general, and LinkedIn in particular. I had become an active user, and later turned into a very active one. Today, I use LinkedIn almost as much as I use Google Search, and I would not trade it for anything in the world.
The problem in that story is that too few LinkedIn users are active users, and this creates tensions between active and passive users. There are over 500 LinkedIn users with more than 1,000 connections. The top 100 users have 3,000 connections or more, and the top 10 boast more than 11,000. Double that for power networker number one. But behind these big numbers stands the rest of the network, and I reckon that the very vast majority of users has less than 5 connections, even though there is no public way of verifying this.
What this means is that most users never invited any of their friends to join the network, and instead just accepted a couple of inbound invitations. If they did not invite their own friends to the network, it is very unlikely that they sent any request to a member of the network who they did not know yet. As such, they are only receivers of requests, passive users. And because they form the very vast majority of users, they are the group that LinkedIn Corporation is the most concerned about, for very legitimate reasons. In other words, LinkedIn Corporation’s top priority is to ensure that members of this group of passive users remain on the network and only receive the most qualified inbound requests for help. As a result, most features that have been added to LinkedIn over the past two years have focused on this one goal, beside the need to monetize the network. The later has been achieved mainly by selling Google ads and catering to the needs of LinkedIn’s largest subset of active users: 100,000 recruiters.
Occasional users who have less than 150 connections in their networks and send a couple of requests a year seem perfectly happy with the way things are. But power networkers who are very active in building up a large network and putting it to use want more and feel that they are entitled to it. After all, they contributed a lot to the network’s ongoing development by inviting most people they had in their already-large address books. But because LinkedIn did not develop much features and tools to help such power users keep their network alive, they had to come up with tricks and workarounds that sometime get annoying, especially to most passive users. One such trick is the use of a feature recently added by LinkedIn that allows a user to notify all members in its network when her profile has changed. It does not take a rocket scientist to quickly figure out how to use such a feature for spamming purposes, and earlier this week one highly connected recruiter used it to advertise a job search he was working on.
This situation has created mounted tension between power networkers and LinkedIn Corporation, resulting in discontent on both sides and measures such as yesterday’s attempt at unionizing power networkers. I for one believe that power networkers are vital to the growth of the LinkedIn network, not only in terms of number of registered users, but also with respect to the value it delivers to all users, both active and passive. But for this to remain true, a new etiquette of social networking with LinkedIn has to be developed, and both sides need to agree on it and change their practices accordingly.
On one hand, power networkers should refrain themselves from using LinkedIn as a spamming tool. Spam adds no value to the recipient, makes the sender look bad and gives a poor reputation to the network. Everybody loses. LinkedIn spam should be banned, period. Similarly, power networkers should feel free to grow their network, even by inviting people they do not already know well yet, but should not harass anyone who does not want to connect to them or join the network at all. Whatever they think of the value they can bring to their connections, it is the recipient’s sole prerogative to accept or decline an invitation, and power networkers must respect it.
On the other hand, LinkedIn Corporation should stop condemning active network building and development practices, and instead encourage them, through a revised user agreement, extended set of best practices, and advanced features. There is tremendous value in a large and active network, and LinkedIn Corporation, its employees and investors will be the top beneficiaries of the network’s overall success.
As mentioned before, LinkedIn is a fantastic tool, and the people at LinkedIn Corporation should be commended for having developed a network of close to 5 million users that brings value to hundreds of thousands every day. I very much hope that this network will continue to grow and believe that increased dialogue between LinkedIn Corporation and its power users is needed. It will eventually lead to the definition of a new Etiquette of LinkedIn, which all users should adhere to in order to guarantee that they will continue getting the value they expect and cherish out of this great community.
Entry filed under: Social Networking
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What is the purpose of power networkers, those with thousands of contacts? If one doesn’t know a connection well or at all, then what does this do to the quality of the network for referrals, requests, etc.?
LinkedIn Corp. encourages us to only invite people into our network that we know well. I’ve generally agreed with this principle and typically decline invitations from those people that just send a generic invitation. I try to cultivate a dialogue with those people who are of interest to me and then with some familiarity will connect with them.
Are the LinkedIn principles for ‘qualified connections’ serving some unknown agenda? What are the views of a power networker and reasons for their building such huge #’s in their network. I have around 260 connections, and I probably know 65% of them quite well. So while I’m not a small passive user, I’m unclear about the gain in expanding to thousands of people.
What am I missing about social networking that you power networkers can share to shed light on my ignorance?
Thank you.
Peter,
Most LinkedIn users adopt similar principles, which is one of the reasons why LinkedIn is working so well. Nevertheless, there is a group of very active networkers who believe that connecting to a broader audience and being selective only when forwarding requests increases the chances of forwarding a useful request, on both sender and receiver sides.
I belong to the later group and found the approach to be fairly effective. It also creates more connexity in the network, in the sense that it connects groups of people that belong to different geographies or industry verticals and would have little chances of meeting otherwise. In my opinion, this connexity is precisely what makes LinkedIn magic.
All that being said, I believe that both approaches work and it’s up to the individual user to decide what’s best for her.
While LinkedIn was never designed for active networkers, LinkedIn is far from condemning active networking. In fact, we have recently added a number of features to support active networking, such as OpenLink and the OpenLink Network, that promote active networking through an opt-in mechanism.
We did this specifically to promote active networking, and to eliminate the ill effects of spam that can happen when a few hundred people go over the edge and sends tens of thousands of invitations. When few people accept their invitations, it is clear that their invitations are unwelcome by our users.
And this small group of a few hundred people does a disservice to the hundreds of thousands of active networkers on LinkedIn who are sensitive to the fact that not everyone is an active networker and that people you don’t know have to be approach in a targeted and thoughtful manner, so that there is value for the recipient.
The invitation messages sent by the group of people who send out mass-invitations to people who don’t know them (let’s call them link collectors for now), may not be advertising a product, like traditional spam, but we all have email boxes that are overflowing, and the last thing the typical LinkedIn users wants is to get an invitation from someone you don’t know.
This is not to say that there aren’t people who appreciate the invitation and who appreciate the fact that the link collector is willing to introduce them to people he or she knows (although you have to wonder what value they can really add when they introduce people they don’t know). But most of our users vote with their feet by not accepting their invitations.
In fact, starting in mid-2005, we received an increasing number of complaints about the link collectors, and users asked us why we let them invite so many people in the first place. We realized we should be more pro-active, and when we looked at the data, we found that people who sent out more than 3,000 invitations were much more likely to draw complaints, and so we made that the default invitation limit.
This limit is a flexible one. As long as their invitation and complaint rates are within the normal range, users will be able to send more invitations. However, if the feedback of our users indicates that their invitations have been generally unwelcome relative to other invitations they receive, we will not increase that limit. We believe that such a “wisdom of the crowds” is best since community standards and feedback regulate what’s OK and what isn’t.
Having invitations limits puts less of a burden on our user base to report people who send them unwelcome invitations, and I think it will make people select more carefully whom they invite to connect. This applies to both free and paying members. Privacy is non-negotiable.
Now, if we didn’t build LinkedIn for active networkers, who did we build it for? We built LinkedIn for the typical business user who knows that relationships matter in business and would like to re-connect with former co-workers, classmates, clients and business partners, and who believe there is value in managing and leveraging their existing network of contacts more effectively, both for their business and career success.
Konstantin,
Thank you so much for this detailed answer, this is exactly the kind of dialogue I was trying to foster with my initial post. I wholeheartedly agree with you and believe that the approach you are taking regarding the issue of spam invitations is a sound one.
A complementary solution could be to enable the invitation process from other interfaces than just the linkedin.com website or the Outlook email client, such as Salesforce.com for example. This would allow power networkers to tailor the content of their invitation to the recipient’s profile, thereby adding value to the invitation itself.
As with any marketplace, there many ways to act. While there may be a consensus of many that there is an obvious code of ethics and practice that should guide us all not everyone sees it that way. Ultimately though, selfish people can disrupt that marketplace.
All communities and organizations need to act in a way that preserves them. If LinkedIn cannot control people who destroy the open nature of networking, then its value will degrade and everyone will have lost something except for a few selfish people.
After all is said and done, there is a lot of value to connecting to people that you don’t really know. After all, we could just email or im all our friends and acquaintances on a regular basis. The value of linked in is to augment conversations that might not ordinarily occur, but there is also a lot of value to people to connect for commercial reasons as well.
I believe that the mechanisms to protect the community are already largely in place, and they include setting preferences for the type of contact you’d prefer. Perhaps, there could also be a setting for notifications. On the down side this requires action on the part of passive users. The flip side of this is that this is a community and a marketplace, and one cannot assume that everyone will abide by the “rules”
[…] Oh goodness - I can’t keep up! Networking is a lot of work, and I believe in networking - I really do! However, this week has been a whirwind of activity in the networking world - specifically LinkedIn. I still don’t know all the particulars, as I’ve been busy working on client sites, but apparently the powers that be at LinkedIn are changing the rules, and that has resulted in a new group being formed LinkedIn Lions (yes, I joined the group!). You can read more about the changes at LinkedIn on Ismael’s blog […]
Wasn’t Google’s incredible success mainly based on PageRank and would Google have been that successful if they would have fixed PR limit at 3,000? I doubt it.
Ismael, your comments are quite precise and accurate. What is required addition to those is the following:
Those within LinkedIn’s “ivory tower” must realize the potentiality of the SuperConnectors banding together to create/finance their own social networking platform. Thus, if this is the case, those within the SuperConnectors network, and subsequent active network base, will follow them. Where does that leave LinkedIn? It leaves them in a precarious situation which could be remedied allowing the purity of networking to proceed naturally without encumberance. Furthermore, I could envision those same SuperConnectors who are also well-connected to LinkedIn’s venture capital firms to provide “decisive” feedback to LinkedIn’s current management with “potential” proposed changes for the long term.
However, it is a “potentiality”; yet, the situation must be realized and stressed to make the appropriate changes.
Michael
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