Posted on by Stilgherrian

I just don’t get LinkedIn, do you?

I’ve tried. I’ve tried several times. And every time I try looking at LinkedIn I always end up staring at it and thinking, “What is the point?”

OK, I do get part of it, that it’s sharing your network of contacts so that everyone can benefit. But to me it seems like a lot of overhead for an as-yet-undefined benefit. It’s Yet Another Database To Maintain.

That, and I get frustrated because there doesn’t seem to be a neat way of saying that I’m a freelancer, working for myself and not a company, and that I want to connect to people in that capacity. See what I mean?

So are you using LinkedIn? How do you get value from it? What am I missing?

[Update 30 March 2011: I’ve closed comments on this post, and on the follow-up post, So LinkedIn is a giant Rolodex, eh? You can continue the conversation at my most recent post, Getting to grips with LinkedIn.]

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58 Replies to “I just don’t get LinkedIn, do you?”

  1. Like most of those commenting I use LinkedIn for staying in touch with colleagues and business contacts. It’s most useful for those who you aren’t close enough to for swapping personal email addresses or adding on other social networks that tend to be more oriented towards friends and family. But in that context it’s lucky to get used more than once a fortnight or so. And then only for a few minutes. It’s just not a very “social” network.

  2. LinkedIn seems aimless to me, it doesn’t serve a clear purpose or show how “relationships matter”. It seems like a avenue for untalented people to have an opportunity to give co-workers a good recommendation in the hopes they get one in return. I’m sure there are people that genuinely use and benefit from the system, but I’ve seen far too many circle jerk instances of C+ level talent touting each other as the greatest thing ever to happen to the IT industry.

  3. Pingback: Stilgherrian · I just don’t get LinkedIn, do you? | Maszman Speaks!

  4. I’ve been on LinkedIn for a while, all I ever got out of it were requests for jobs in my company. I finally had to put a disclaimer in my profile that I wasn’t able to provide hiring information. Other than that, I’m afraid it’s not done much for me at all.

  5. I find Linkedin useful in real-world networking situations. Example:

    I attended a small-business networking event last week, and while there I got chatting to another attendee. “John” and I exchanged cards and talked for a while before drifting away – you now how those sorts of events go. So I pulled out my Iphone, Googled (his name) + (company name) and saw he was on LinkedIn. I loaded LinkedIn and within seconds I knew John’s role within his company, how long he’d been there, what his previous roles had been, where he went to school, and I saw that while we’d never met before we were only one degree of separation apart – we had a handful of regular business contacts in common – which meant I knew I had some trusted people of whom I could ask “hey does this guy John know what he’s talking about?”. With one click all of his contact details were saved for later, and the next time I bumped into John I had a far more comprehensive mental framework into which I could place him as far as professional credibility was concerned.

    So in that sense I think of it more as a “Super Hashable” than as a social network like Facebook.

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