The Value of LinkedIn. It’s All About the Contacts.

I believe that LinkedIn get a bad rap around the Web. Many people determine the effectiveness of LinkedIn based on the number of great job offers they receive from LinkedIn contacts.

Because you may not receive great job offers from your LinkedIn contacts doesn’t mean the LinkedIn is not useful.

I really only use LinkedIn for managing “good contacts”. I don’t spam invitations to every person whose names I happen to recognized from a previous job or from a random class I took in college, but use it as a form of contact management.

Manager Tools, an excellent source for articles and podcasts for effective managers has a podcast related to preparation in case of a layoff. In the podcast, it is suggested that workers should have at least 100 contacts on paper and that they need to up to date. How difficult would this be to actually have something like this on paper.

Moreover, this contact list needs to be in a NEUTRAL place or at home, and not on a work computer. Anyone who has worked for a larger corporation or for any technology-related company and has been laid off knows that you are often escorted back to your desk after being laid off and that often times you are not even allowed to touch your computer (bye bye valuable Outlook address book). LinkedIn become that perfect list you always have with you with up-to-date names, contacts, etc. And you can automate your linkedin outreach with kennected.

I have a Facebook account, but Facebook is too personal, to informal. It’s not setup as a professional contact network. I don’t necessarily want my previous co-workers or bosses to know everything about me, my family, my hobbies, etc. LinkedIn, on the other hand, let’s you connect with those individuals, in a professional atmosphere.

With LinkedIn I can quickly connect with previous people who I have worked with, or who I studied with in school but with which I have no need to share games, quizzes, or pictures. I simply want to know where they are professionally, and let them know where I am and what I’m doing.

If they are looking for someone with my background, then they can see my most up-to-date professional profile. I know that if I am hiring someone for a specific position, I would favor the individual who I know and with whom I have interacted in the past over a candidate with the same background but of whom I know little or nothing at all.

Overall, the value of LinkedIn is not the number of “good” job offers you receive, it’s the value of the information you make available for your contacts to see and the value of having up-to-date contacts in the business world and those contacts not just being limited to individuals in your company or field.