Aug 09 2007
Point made – the badge of ubiquity doesn’t work
Forbes.com Entrepreneurs LinkedIn Group
As I wrote a while back, show me a LinkedIn spammer and they are a member of a Forbes.com LinkedIn group. Try to join such a group and … good luck. I worked there and can’t join.
Scott Allen (who I am not accusing of being a LinkedIn luser) writes about the torture of joining one of these useless bands of Forbesians.
“I had a reader write to me asking how to join the Forbes.com Entrepreneurs LinkedIn Group (of which I’m a member). So, being the helpful guy I am, I went to go look it up to send it to him. Imagine my surprise when I couldn’t find it!”
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Dave
you are a living God, as mighty and myrtful as Ganeesh the Capricious.
best
Jim
What the hell is the point of Linked In?
I must be missing something.
To collect as many names as possible and then flog yourself to them as a consultant.
It is the Pokemon of social networks: “Gotta get em all.”
Not sure who Scott Allen is, but maybe you could refer him to Google…search for “linkedin forbes” and you’ll find it.
I think we’re starting to see a bit of a reaction to general networking sites for professionals. Sure you can collect a lot of pelts and show off how many people you are connected to but how many of those people are of any real use to you professionally? (Full disclosure here: I work for http://www.spoke.com, a site that tries to connect business people in a much more focused way — in our case B2B sales, marketers and HR/recruiters.)
More focused sites are beginning to spring up — there’s one for lawyers but I’ve forgotten the URL. There’s a real need for sites that let you connect on a peer-to-peer basis with people who know your business or job and can help you with it. This is a less restrictive (and costly) version of what CIO and others have done with their Executive Councils — where you have to pay a certain amount and have a certain job title to get in and get access to others in a similar situation.
Peter, Scott is author of a Linked-In blog, and yes, he has heard of this thing called Google:
“So, I turned to Google and searched for “forbes.com entrepreneurs†“linkedin groupâ€. Amazingly, there were only a handful of results, not counting all the LinkedIn profiles of people who are members. In fact, only one actually had the link — no surprise, from my good friend Vincent Wright!”
[...] David Churbuck Blog, “Point made – the badge of ubiquity doesn’t work“, “Un-dis-ubi-Forbexclusivity” [cited 19 Oct 2007] [...]