Networking February 2008
How do I love LinkedIn? Let me count millions of ways…
by Rebecca Patt,
Vice President of Development, Dick Wray Executive Search.
I am as giddy about LinkedIn.com as a schoolgirl with a MySpace account. Many restaurant industry executives have also jumped on the bandwagon, judging by the increasing number of “Invitations to Connect” in my inbox every month. The number of people on the site is growing like wildfire, having doubled in 2007 to 17 million.
LinkedIn is an amazing tool for expanding your network and opening doors in the business world.
One could say that LinkedIn is a buttoned-up version of MySpace or Facebook, geared to the demographic of experienced professionals. According to a recent quote from LinkedIn’s CEO Dan Nye, the average age of LinkedIn users is 41, and they have an income of over $51,000. You won’t find any neon wallpaper or personal theme music. The uniform aesthetic is blue and gray, and only recently the site began allowing users to upload one photo.
I’ll go ahead and let you in on a little tip: corporate and third-party recruiters are all over LinkedIn like NFL scouts at a USC game because top talent abounds.
The core of LinkedIn is the personal profile - your own simple webpage of sorts. You can choose how public your profile is, having it appear on Google and Yahoo searches if you’d like. This self-written profile summarizes your resume and helps you to find and be found by colleagues, clients, and partners. Your profile can feature statements of recommendation written by or for your contacts. It can list your current company, location, skill set, industry, title, professional organizations you belong to, and where you’ve previously worked and attended school. You add connections to your profile by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you, allowing for mutual access to each other’s LinkedIn contacts.
For example, in my LinkedIn network, there are 816,100+ users whose names and bios I can see because they fall within my extended network, which reaches to three degrees of separation: my LinkedIn connections, my connections’ contacts, and the people they know. Say I do a quick search on LinkedIn specifying users with the current title “president” and the industry “restaurant.” My search reveals 404 names and bios in my extended network, plus 100 search results of others outside my network whose companies and titles I can see but with no names. I can directly email people inside or outside my network because I am a Premium member (more on that later). It would take a whole lot of old-fashioned exchanging of business cards to tap into that kind of list, and the bios have much more data than could ever fit on business card.
The search function and bios offer an amazing platform for finding potential clients, recruits, service providers, subject experts, and partners while gaining more exposure for yourself and your company. Every user is asked to check boxes specifying their interests for being on LinkedIn: career opportunities, consulting offers, new ventures, job inquiries, expertise requests, business deals, reference requests, or getting back in touch.
It’s free to search the site, create a personal profile, link to others and take advantage of many of its features. Paid accounts offer expanded capabilities to contact other users and view search results. I pay $19.95 monthly for my account. With the relationships I have made, the investment has easily paid for itself for quite a few years to come, and some of the people I’ve connected with would probably say the same thing.
Don’t miss the boat on this one. To grow and leverage your LinkedIn network, you can link to me by going to LinkedIn.com and from your own profile, email me an invitation to connect at Rebecca.patt@dickwray.com.
Rebecca Patt is Vice President of Development at Dick Wray Executive Search. She can be reached at 1.888.875.9993 ext. 106.