Are You LinkedIn? Why…?
Marianne Paskowski over at BusinessWeek took a look this week at the value of LinkedIn – and she concludes that, well, there isn't much value in it. At least not from a business perspective.
In fact, Paskowski seems down right cynical about social networking in general. She says it isolates people instead of building actual relationships for them:
I've seen this phenomenon going on for a long time, mostly with kids text-messaging each other or hanging out online on Facebook or MySpace instead of being able to utter a coherent sentence at a social occasion. Is this what our species has become?
As a teacher, I feel the opposite way. Most of my kids get plenty of verbal exercise. Email, blogging, microblogs (like Twitter), and social media like MySpace and Facebook are exercises in literacy for kids from middle school to the early twenties. Putting letters together to form words and articulating their ideas in some written form can be far more challenging than just talking. And it's a skill they need…
Of course, that's not really relevant to our discussion. If you're in retail sales, LinkedIn probably isn't going to make you a lot of money. If you're a consultant or a freelancer of some kind looking for one week gigs in personnel development or some kind of corporate problem solving, your experience may be entirely different. LinkedIn may prove more useful.
Of course, who am I to say? I have eight contacts after largely neglecting LinkedIn for the three months I've been on it. Of course, I've neglected it because, well, I don't need it. At the moment I have more work than I can do. And so does Paskowski (I suspect). So who is she to say?
What does LinkedIn (or Facebook and MySpace, for that matter) do for you? Paskowski is right about the entertainment value of social media. I'm on MySpace because other people connected to my day job are on MySpace – teachers, parents, etc. I spend three to seven minutes a day on MySpace to look at what mood people are in and see what information I can glean there. Facebook is more time consuming for me. I've reconnected there with a few people from past lives – high school, or my time overseas, or pervious jobs. Plus some of the games are nice.
LinkedIn is slightly more formal. I think of it as a place where I can put up an online résumé, but I'm not looking for much more than that out of it. And you probably shouldn't be, either.
Will anyone read your résumé on LinkedIn? Maybe. Maybe not…
© Mario Sundar
Technology | Greg Cruey | 26 December 2008 |
4 Comments
Other Links to this Post
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
By Phil Gerbyshak, December 27, 2008 @ 2:21 pm
LinkedIn is valuable if folks in your network or folks you want in your network are using it. You have to fish where the fish are. That’s what I find most valuable there, for the passive person looking to find more information about me.
I also find it very valuable for folks in my network looking who ask me for help getting into insert company here. If I know someone in the company, they can see who this person is and how I’m connected to them, and I can do a nice introduction that way. Takes some of the stress off of me to rack my brain for “Now who do I know at xyz corporation?” questions.
By Steve Tylock, December 28, 2008 @ 8:46 pm
Thanks for the article – I hadn’t seen the one on BW yet and wrote this in response:
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com/archives/getting-linkedin/
Best success with LinkedIn!
[And remember - it is best to grow your network when you don't need it;-]
steve
–
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock
By small business web design, January 6, 2009 @ 1:47 pm
See http://www.gogets.com for small business web design :)
By Ajlouny, January 18, 2009 @ 4:05 pm
I am able to stay closer to my friends in family more now than ever. They are always at my finger tips.