King Marketing

Find out who's already on LinkedIn

Once you have created your personalized LinkedIn account, begin your search for contacts by posting the contents of your address book to the “my profile” section on LinkedIn. This will be used solely for the purpose of data mining and it does not become visible to anyone else or get used for any nefarious purpose. By doing this, you will be able to see which of your existing contacts are already registered on the site. For those of you on Windows, your Outlook address book automatically includes all people to whom you've previously sent messages. Mac users may have to go through a simple procedure to move your previous recipients list from Mail into Address Book before exporting to LinkedIn.

Invite your contacts who are already on LinkedIn

Do NOT spam all of your contacts, but only those who are already registered. The fact that they registered a profile tells you that they were interested in networking this way, and so will probably not mind an invitation to connect. For certain of your contacts, you might want to send them one-off messages so you can make it completely personalized (use the LinkedIn mailer, though, so that the links to your profile are automatically generated). For the others, use the batch emailing function on the site. You should customize the invitation so it sounds like it's coming from you.

Create the opportunity for action beyond accepting your invitation

I had good success asking a simple question along with the invitations that I sent out to my contacts – “Have you found LinkedIn useful?” Many people not only accepted the invitation, but also sent me an email directly answering my question. In a few cases, it led to discussion of opportunities to get together for a beer and catch up, which in turn might lead to other opportunities.

Scan your connections' connections

As each person accepts your invitation, you will get an email from LinkedIn with a link to their profile. You should browse the complete list of their connections and see if there's anyone you know well enough to invite directly and for whom you can find an email address. By properly acknowledging that there is a direct connection, you bring their circle of contacts one step closer to you and can reach more people through fewer steps. Again, don't do this indiscriminately, pick and choose the ones you think are most likely to accept and who will yield the greatest benefit. You can always take this step later if you see that a connection you want to make is passing through them and multiple other people.

Explore the "reconnect" function on your LinkedIn home page

The information in your profile about previous employment and educational history is compared with the entire LinkedIn database, highlighting people you may know but for whom you don't have current contact information. This method allows you to send them a message directly (instead of asking someone else for an introduction) but without having to know how to reach them.

Selectively invite new users

Among your contacts, you probably know a few people who are well-connected and who would probably appreciate using a service like this. Chances are, they've even heard of it but just haven't done anything about it (I'm a good example; it took me about six months before I started actively using the service). Invite them one at a time and explain why you think it would be a good idea for them to join, offer to help them get started if necessary, etc.

Next Steps

That takes care of the first phase, establishing a view of our network. Once you've done so, you need to think about how best to use it. From the feedback I've received and things I've read online, the introduction process is where the system starts to fall apart. One major problem is that people have abused it by indiscriminately passing along requests, which defeats the purpose of using personal connections for this type of thing - the whole point is that you should be able to trust that an introduction that came from a friend (or friend of a friend) will have been vetted somewhat and that you're only hearing about it because your connection thinks it will be useful to you.

As I said above, I'm just getting started with LinkedIn. I'll post again when I figure out how to use the service effectively.

Credit where credit is due:

A lot of what I learned about using LinkedIn was gleaned from three sources: Dave Taylor, Des Walsh, and Christian Mayaud. The posts linked here are just samples of the useful information I found on these three sites, you can check those out and/or join the LinkedIn Bloggers Forum if you want to meet a bunch of other people talking about ways to make the most of the service.