Ponderings in a corner of the universe

Hello & Happy New Year!

I love LinkedIN… its fun to see your network grow and get those inside connections. It reminds me of the “6 Degrees of Bacon’ game where you connect any actor to Kevin Bacon through only 6 degrees. Its amazing to see the connections you have just through 3 degrees on LinkedIN!

The Bad News

LinkedIN is getting ABUSED… you’ve probably noticed it as much as I have. With Intel going through all these changes it has it leaves many people looking for jobs. Many of those people are abusing the “work colleagues” section of LinkedIN to just ‘grow’ their network arbitrarily. Worse yet many recruiters are pretending to have worked at companies to just get connections…

The more this happens the less value there is in connections. The less value there is in LinkedIN and the less likely it will ever help you be successful. I want to use LinkedIN to find business contacts and if there are is no value in apparent connections because of arbitrary ones then its not going to be of any use, no one will care. LinkedIN will die. Keeping it alive is up to us as linkedinziens! The power of networking is clear, lets keep LinkedIN useful!

THE GOOD NEWS

You can keep it useful! But how? When you get an invitation to connect from someone you don’t know, don’t just ‘REJECT’ it… click on ‘REPORT ABUSE’. If we work together we can keep the LinkedIN community valuable to us all!

Happy Networking!

P.S. No I don’t work for LinkedIN, I’m just a concerned linkedinzien… :-)