I feed the status stream of all my LinkedIn connections into my RSS reader. It is a great way to monitor what’s going on with the people I care about on LinkedIn.
Scanning it this morning, I noticed one of my connections was newly connected to about 25 people. As in, there was a repeated batch of “[insert name] is now connected to [insert name].”
I have to assume that my connection got into LinkedIn last night, saw that he had a bunch of connection invites, and accepted the invitations all at once…
Let me preface this by saying that the social web, and all that that implies, is utilized differently by EACH PERSON. What works for one, may not be comfortable, or effective, for another… And that’s ok.
But I don’t think the example I cited above is the most effective way. Did my connection really even know who he was accepting into his LinkedIn network? Or was he just trying to drive up his numbers and/or not be rude to those who invited him? How many of you [I know I have] have accepted invitations to large batches of invites, and then immediately looked at your follower count to see what the new number was?
[whatever. you know you have...]
This is the mentality that I think gets people in trouble. And by trouble I mean, they invest time and work into the social web, but don’t ever really see any meaningful value from it…other than driving up raw numbers of connections on various networks that at the end of the day doesn’t mean anything.
See, I think you should think through every one of those invites. Who is this person? Why are they trying to connect to me? What do they want/need from me? What can I benefit from connecting to them? Who do they know? How are THEIR connections relevant to me? How can I serve these people today? How can I bring value into their world?
The social web and all its various tools are simply means to collect information. Information that you can then use to take a meaningful action. That action could be simply to say “hello” and “how can I help you today?” But that’s a meaningful and important action…
Now, combine these deliberate actions, and apply them steadily over time! [and I don't mean 30 days, I mean years] That’s when you begin to see where this can have meaning in forging deeper connections with real people, increasing prospects to your business, strengthening your personal brand, etc…
So, the next time you log into LinkedIn or Facebook or Foursquare and see a pile of invites waiting for action, don’t just blindly click yes to all. Go through them slowly, carefully, deliberately, and think about what the connection means, and how you can take an immediate action that benefits the both of you…
What do you think?
[subscribe to my RSS feed]
[cartoon by @gapingvoid]