One
of the features of LinkedIn is “People You May Know.” It’s a rotating roster of
people that appears on your page when you log in and whom you’re invited to
“link” to or “follow.” I’m not sure how these people are selected. Is it
random? Do they pay for it? Or are they just the most successful “linkers” in
the system? But 99 percent of them are people I don’t know.
The
flip side to that is that for the 1 percent I recognize, I can usually
telephone or email them if I want to talk with them. We already know each
other. There would be little to no advantage to linking to them on
LinkedIn. I have to conclude that the
feature is meant for people who collect other people, for whatever purpose. A
numbers game, maybe? Link up with 500 people and maybe one of them will buy
something from you? And that 500 number
isn’t made up, either; I’ve seen people who have that many links in their
chain, and there may be others with more for all I know.
Back
in school – way back – when I was a business major in New York, we were
obsessed with “contacts.” There was even one instructor who made it part of his
course to meet with each student at a downtown restaurant to demonstrate the
art of the business lunch. It was tacit admission that you weren’t going
anywhere, especially in advertising, in New York, unless you could schmooze
with people. But good grief! The most ambitious among us would have at best a
handful of contacts. Only later, once in business, would any of the group
develop the fabled Rolodex that marked the connected player, and I don’t think
there was room for 500 of those little cards on any Rolodex I ever saw. How did
we get by?
Like
good people, who can be promoted to their level of incompetence (the Peter
Principle) a good idea can be extended beyond its practical limits and become a
caricature of itself. I read recently that LinkedIn has 277 million members and
counting; in theory you can link to all of them if you want. That may make
having only 500 seem reasonable, but it’s not, unless you’re General Motors,
and not many of the people I see on LinkedIn make it into that size category. In
fact, an awful lot are one-man or -woman entrepreneurial entities (aka
freelancers in many cases, as in mine). If
it’s an active relationship, there wouldn’t be time for anything else but
exchanging messages; and if it’s not active, what’s the point? bragging rights for “most links”? Just one
more of these newfangled inventions I use but don’t understand.
