Use LinkedIn for Writing Work

Remember the phrases "upwardly mobile" and "social climbing"? If you're old enough, you will. Keep them in mind as you read on.

Quite a few years ago, I took advice from someone I should have not. Eventually I discovered the person was less than stable and had multiple family problems. The advice? To join Google's Orkut social networking site rather than Linkedin. The notion was to network for business purposes, but Orkut turned into a sandbox for foreigners to practice English and play at Machiavellian principles.

Although I'm still trying to sort out how the various parts of Linkedin operate, I get the drift. (I'm still pondering the differences among contacts, connections, invitations, and introductions.) The way to work it for business is to not treat the service as a social network. Sounds simple, yes? No, we are conditioned to immediately enroll all our friends when we join such a group, simply duplicating our existing social network. Anyway, how many "friends" can one have?

With Linkedin, the phrase "upwardly mobile" might best be kept in mind. It's like getting useful back links for your website--you want ones from more prestigious sites, those with a PageRank at least one notch higher than yours. At Linkedin, go for the contacts/connections with people who can do you some good, crass as it may sound. Their contacts, to whom they can provide you with introductions, may be the perfect sources for new work for you. When you join the site, it offers a link to The LinkedIn Blog: Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn | Guy Kawasaki. Highly recommended. Read it first, before joining, if you can.

I haven't touched on the search processes at Linkedin, finding those initial best connections, mainly because I don't have a handle on them yet. One new discovery: Linkedin has higher levels of paid membership with even better features.

See the initial post about this adventure and one made a few days later.