Networking the West with Liz Ryan

Social Networking Bandits?

By Liz Ryan, 1-03-07

Here in the West, we appreciate social networking - we need it. We're not thick as thieves with thousands of other people in our industries, not in places like Missoula and Boulder. We don't have the huge industry concentrations they have in New York and Chicago and London. Sometimes, we learn about a fascinating person because we find him or her online - and learn that the person lives and works maybe blocks away from us!

It happened to me last summer. I wrote to the president of an international women's organization, located in Canada. A few days later, I got an email back from the person who runs technology for this global women's organization. That person - Stephanie - lives in Boulder, maybe a mile and a half from me. That would be a small-world story anywhere, but particularly in a small city like Boulder. Anyway, my point is: the online connections are not trivial to New West networkers, because we're not overwhelmed with face-to-face networking events and industry functions like the businesspeople in LA and other megalopolae.

So imagine my horror when I read on a LinkedIn-related list-serv (it's called MyLinkedInPowerForum) that a LinkedIn user was trying to get money from another user, by acting as a sort of virtual highwayman. The lady who wrote to the list-serv had taken a gig as a contract recruiter, and was using LinkedIn to locate likely candidates for the company that hired her. She found such a candidate, she thought - but he was removed from her by a couple of hops on LinkedIn, so she used the "message in a bottle" feature of LinkedIn to make contact with the candidate directly. No dice - the first intermediate contact put her bottled message through, but the second one wrote back to say "You have to split your recruiting fee with me, if you want me to send on your message to the candidate."

I guess it was only a matter of time. LinkedIn is getting close to five years old, so people have had time to get used to it and figure out how to do evil things like this troll-on-the-bridge routine. There was a whole debate about the issue on the LinkedInPowerForum, with certain folks defending the bandit's behavior ("Hey, everybody has to make a buck") and a saner majority assailing it. The key question for me is, does the fellow at the end of the line, the one who signed up to be the highwayman's "trusted colleague" on LinkedIn, approve the deal? Here is a guy who does not know about what might be a terrific job opportunity, because a person he connected to directly on LinkedIn is restricting access to him to those people who will pay him. Seamy!

In any enterprise or arena, I know, you are going to get some Tony Soprano types. I once had a conference organizer threaten to leave the conference - yep, the conference she had organized and was running at the very moment she made her threat - unless I agreed to a fee increase that I'd never heard of or approved before, and also gave her a check on the spot. In other words, she believed that I'd be scared enough of her on-the-spot departure that I would fork over the cash, but of course I didn't do it. Another time a guy built a website for me (and, like an idiot, I had him host the site as well) and threatened to take it down unless I paid him a sum (that he just made up in his mind, based on nothing that I know of) that day, by wire transfer. I know, you are thinking, how do you find all these bad actors? but luckily there are only those two incidents to report in over 20 years of doing business. So that's the good news. But back to LinkedIn - is there any hope for social networking when people will try to sell their own LinkedIn contacts for cash?

The biggest issue for me vis-a-vis LinkedIn has been the philosophical tug-of-war between the power users (some call them "invitation sluts") and the more careful connectors. If that were just a philosophical difference, no one would care much, but the rift has all sorts of implications for LinkedIn's pricing models, customer service, and so on. As you can imagine, some people (recruiters and others) want to be connected to everyone in the world, while others define "trusted colleagues" more conservatively, for instance to exclude people they've never met or heard of. To each her own. But this new banditry gives me pause, because it suggests to me that LinkedIn as an organization will have to take on a more active role (as eBay also found itself having to do) in user-to-user interactions. Personally, I think the troll should be identified on LinkedIn, at a minimum, if not drawn and quartered.

I thought it was bad enough, a year ago, when a major LinkedIn user started spamming his contacts to ask them to send him money. But at least he was pitching it as a philanthropic deal ("My business is failing, and I really need cash") versus a business transaction. I have no sympathy for online bandits, who could spoil the roads for all of us. If this kind of thing continues, we'll need to find a more apt term than "social networking" to describe what's happening - maybe "commerce in contacts" is more like it.

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