Your LinkedIn network is getting less valuable with the day
Written on September 3, 2008 – 11:55 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yesterday a business student interviewed me for his master thesis about the perceived trustworthiness within social networking sites. He wanted to know how I shaped my judgments about people on LinkedIn. His last question blew me away, although is was very simple. “How will LinkedIn be evolved in five years?”. I had never really thought about this. After a few minutes, I realized my LinkedIn network will be quite useless then. When we were discussing this devaluation, we both acknowledged it had two main reasons. We’re too friendly, and a lot of people go separate ways.
We’re too friendly
LinkedIn tries very hard to convince us not to accept people we hardly know with their explanatory “Which invitations should you accept?” link. According to this page, we have to consider replying or deciding later when we don’t know the sender well. Fair enough, but you’re not gonna reject that guy with who you had a nice chat during a conference? Most of us are too friendly. We don’t want to offend the chap who invites you to connect. What do we have to lose anyway?
Separate ways
Of all these people we accept, quite a few make sudden career moves to a totally different industry or stop working at all. Some might even die. These occurrences make some of our connections useless. After a while, say five years, a whole lot of connections are not relevant anymore. They can’t help us with questions, because there out of the game for quite some time, or they have left everything business-related behind.
The network will lose its value
So in five years, your first grade network will be as cluttered as your third grade network is now. You’ve forgotten who half of the people are, and from some, you’ll never hear again. Moreover, have you ever thought about how many contacts you’ll have by then. A few thousand maybe? To sum it up: your network will become quite useless. LinkedIn will evolve in something else, a phone book on steroids.
LinkedIn as the ultimate phone book
I assume you’ll keep your profile up to date, so will other people who take LinkedIn seriously. That will make LinkedIn a rather great phone book. You can always look up ANYONE, as the chance is really big this person will have registered on LinkedIn by then. The value of the resume stays in touch. The ways of contacting people as well. There’s just thing that will be pretty useless, the graph showing you’re connected to this person trough 132321 other people.
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By Gard Jenssen on Sep 3, 2008
Hmm - not really sure I can agree to your conclusion. One brief meeting at a conference can be enough to make contact 5 years later. People can become more or less relevant over time. One of the most exciting aspects of your LinkedIn network is that when people move jobs you suddenly know people in a new company. As time goes by I think we’ll also see that contacting strangers through contacts will become more an acceptable every-day thing.
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I think in the end we’re thinking the same about LinkedIn, just one giant phone directory. Also for strangers. But the value of a LinkedIn connection isn’t really relevant anymore then.
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My point is that you can do a lot more with LinkedIn than you can with a phone directory or your Outlook contacts file. And as with any network the value of the network increases exponentially with the number of nodes (members, connections). So, no again, I think your conclusion is fundamentally wrong and that your view of LinkedIn is misconceived. Perhaps because you want to do something else with it than what it was intended for?
One thing they need to develop though is annotation for each member so that I can note down a few lines for each person such as where did we meet, etc. I agree that it becomes hard to keep track of thousands of relationships. Still if you follow what some of the LinkedIn hardcore networkers do, you’ll find that maybe just the fact that you are connected 1st degree to someone can be enough of an icebreaker to make things happen for you.
PS: Some more ideas on how you can use LinkedIn: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/20.....o_use.html
reGARDs :-)
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By Timo Paloheimo on Sep 3, 2008
How has LinkedIn evolved in the past 5 years? Not much, and I think this will be the case in the future as well.
To me LinkedIn has always been the place to search what kinds of jobs other people have had previously and where they have wandered off later on.
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right, you only use a phone directory when you need one
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By LivePaola on Sep 3, 2008
TechCrunch also has an article about LinkedIn today, but I think yours is more interesting. I quoted you in the comments. Cheers.
PS: “lose”, not “loose”! :-)
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appreciate it!
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By Allan on Sep 4, 2008
Nice article, your right. I’ve been thinking about how LinkedIn has helped me. Once I add a contact I usually don’t do anything with that connection. LinkedIn is good for finding a job but still takes a lot of work to transact business.
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By Eric on Sep 4, 2008
Ernst-Jan, I still added you on LinkedIn today. Let’s see how valuable we will be for each other in 5 years ;)
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By Ruben on Sep 6, 2008
I often “refuse” contacts by just archiving their request (denying seems too harsh since you also block them in that case).
But if the problem of clutter arises, or worsenes, LinkedIn could make a feature to put a value on your contacts. Value could be connected to how often you’ve had contact, if you have them on other social networks, how many connections you share, how many groups, places, interests, jobs, whatever you share, etc…
My guess is that currently the clutter isn’t bad enough for them to implement stuff like that, so I guess LinkedIn is still growing :)
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By Gert Jan on Dec 3, 2008
I think it is interesting for sales people to see what company relations are, who is making decisions etc. And for headhunters off course.
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