In Tech: LinkedIn 101 – An Introduction to Business Networking’s #1 Tool
If Facebook had a raging-capitalist for an older brother, it would be LinkedIn. Fast becoming the gold standard in online business networking, LinkedIn’s growth has been quite staggering. The site describes itself as an ‘interconnected network of experienced professionals from around the world’, and for a growing number of people it is laying the foundation for plotting their next career move.
It recently hit 36 million members and is adding new users at a rate of about one member per second.
According to ComScore, it has gone from about 3.6 million unique monthly visitors a year ago to 7.7 million today, which would make it even with Yahoo HotJobs, the third-largest online job site.
While LinkedIn users are growing quickly, many people are still ‘LinkedOut’. If you’re still not sure about LinkedIn both what it is and whether it is right for you, this is the post for you.
So what is LinkedIn? This video explains LinkedIn’s concept in a simple, crafty way.
While awareness and usage of LinkedIn and other business-focused social networking sites are growing, some continue to view it with skepticism. The notion of gaining ‘connections’ or in a similar way the idea of adding ‘friends’ on other sites is too watered-down to have meaning.
There is no denying that some ‘connections’ or ‘friends’ on these sites may be fairly classified as ‘weak’, perhaps even the majority of them. However, for 36 million people and according to one Stanford University sociologist, ‘weak ties’ may be your best friends.
“Weak ties are your windows to the world,” says Stanford University sociologist Mark Granovetter, who first wrote about this phenomenon in the early 1970s. “When you’re looking for new ideas and new connections, you don’t get them from family or close friends. It’s the weak ties that connect you to different circles and opportunities.”
After all, your close family and friends tend to occupy the same circles you do. It’s the casual distant relationship — perhaps the guy from college you bumped into the other day — who is much more likely to open the door to a new direction.
In his classic 1973 study, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” Granovetter wrote that of the people he surveyed who had found jobs through contacts, more than 80% reported that they saw the contact occasionally (55.6%) or rarely (27.8%). Chance meetings and mutual friends were often the reason the contact and the job-seeker found each other.
The message is pretty clear: People who have either lost a job or fear losing the one they have (which may encompass all of us) should start buttering up old acquaintances and get with the social-networking thing.
Understanding the concept of LinkedIn is one thing, but truly seeing an example of how connections can be made is another. Thanks to another crafty video, we can get a deeper glimpse into how LinkedIn really works.
We’ll be posting more about LinkedIn in Profit’s upcoming In Tech section. Our next post will cover tips and tricks for unlocking the vast potential of this almost-indispensable business tool.
For more background into the company; here is a great recent interview by Charlie Rose with Reid Hoffman – Co-Founder and CEO of LinkedIn.
In this video, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington nabs Reid Hoffman for a casual interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
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