Networking the West with Liz Ryan

Latest Online Networking “Are You Kidding?” Story

By Liz Ryan, 4-27-07

Okay, what do you make of this?

I posted a message to my favorite LinkedIn-related email group, called MyLinkedInPowerForum. In my message I shared this information: “I have started a new campaign! When someone sends me a LinkedIn invitation using the boilerplate invite lingo, namely ‘I want to add you to my network’ and I don’t recognize the person’s name, I used to ignore the invitation. It would sit in my LinkedIn inbox and languish, but now I have 250 of those invitations sitting, waiting to expire. So I am taking a more proactive approach and writing to these inviters with the following language:

In my letters to these folks I’ve been trying to be polite and friendly but also to get the point across that if you’re going to invite someone to connect to you on LinkedIn and you don’t know him or her from Adam, you might want to say that right up front. Otherwise, your prospective connection could waste half an hour searching for you in their Outlook address book, email archives etc.”

So anyway—I post this message to the MyLinkedInPowerForum group and it starts a big back-and-forth, some folks saying that they accept all invitations they get, and why, and others saying they don’t, and so on and so forth. After all that conversation, one person (I couldn’t even tell you his or her gender) posts a message saying ‘I sent you an invitation just like that Liz - wanting to be part of your network and vice versa - and got one of those responses back from you, which turned me off from further conversation.’

Now think about this—forgetting about online networking for a moment and just remembering everything we learned about conversation as children.

I get an email from you, out of the blue. You don’t know me and you KNOW that you don’t know me. But you don’t say “I don’t know you” in your message, so I have to figure out why your name isn’t familiar....can’t figure out who you are....and finally take the time to write back to you, asking for a little more information.

Your response to that is to drop the thread and have no more communication with me—because I was so bold as to ask you ‘Do we know one another?’!

Then (this is the punchline) after all the backing-and-forthing on the MyLinkedInPowerForum email group, the same person writes to me and says “Since we’ve had all this discussion on the email group, NOW will you connect to me?”

I write six columns a week and four blogs. And I will never, ever run out of material to write about.

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