LinkedIn Stories

Ongoing research into the value of social networks and, more specifically, how we can use them within the professional organization led me to reach out via LinkedIn and ask the following "If you have a good story about how LinkedIn helped you do something I would appreciate if you could share it.”

The response rate was quite good and the responses insightful. There have been many anecdotes that illustrate a great deal of utility to some people along with others who responded they could not see the point and after creating an account had stopped using it. This seems fairly consistent with the model of early and late adopters of a service or technology.

Correlating the low-use anecdotes with service professionals, it seems that many professionals who network well offline are simply uncomfortable doing it online, for now anyway.

Here are a few of the more interesting stories that came back:

1) “For me it has helped me establish some contacts that I had in the past, but lost contact with. I also see it as a better tool for managing contacts, because if a contacts information changes they update the information..”

2) “I helped IBM come up with a fix for a big bug in the smart upgrade process at Lotusphere 2007. A guy who was working for IBM wanted to get a hold of me, found a mutual co-worker through his linkedin list of resources who knew me and the fix. They contacted me via the interface and I returned his call. I was able to pass on the fix to this guy which helped him upgrade to V7.”

3) “I hired a team member after receiving the monthly LinkedIn "updates about people in your network" mail, which stated that he updated his profile.

Since he used to work for another department at my firm, I called to ask if his profile update indicates that he is looking for a new job, and indeed, he was on his way out... so thanks to LinkedIn we were able to keep him with us.”

4) “LinkedIn has been very useful for me from a business development perspective. I've been working on increasing the distribution of our content with wireless carriers and LinkedIn has helped me find great contacts at the carriers through my existing contacts.”

5) “It amazes me to see how many people I can reach through 2 degrees of separation and 3 degrees of separation. My personal business network expands from 90+ people to over 1 million individuals.

It is up to each one of us to utilize that network to find a job, to find a new client, or a deal.
I am a convert to Linkedin which I check every day. I have benefited from it by expanding my business reach by a factor of 1000 “

How can we provide tools of similar utility within the corporare world?

Do the measures of usefulness that apply across organizations apply within the organization and specifically which ones..?

This is the challenge but there are many ideas beginning to form which I hope to share with you here shortly.