Are you Linked In? I am, over and over and over again. But I have to wonder what good it is.
On the website Linked In, one creates a profile and then “invites” colleagues, past and present, to “link” to your profile. I’m linked with people I worked with two decades ago. Sometimes I get an invitation to link to someone I can’t even remember until I google them. So here I am, linked up the wazoo to people all over the country…and now what? We are linked but I have this suspicion that once we’re linked, that’s it. There is no evidence that anyone is actually USING the website for its intended purpose – to find people to hire for freelance, consulting and other jobs.
We’re all just sitting there, linked, and nothing ever seems to happen. I get a few invitations a week to link to this person or that person but I never, ever get any other correspondence via Linked In. Do you? Or have you ever heard of anyone who has been sought out on the Linked In website and actually contracted to do an actual task? I suspect that we’re all spending so much time linking to each other to no avail, much like those “petition” emails that go around in circles for years with no one ever being responsible for sending in all of those carefully added names to whatever body is doing whatever it is the petitition says we don’t like. We link and we link and we link and…that keeps us so busy we don’t notice that there’s no result. I’d love to learn that I’m mistaken so please, if you’ve had a Linked In experience, let me know! Link up!