LinkedIn

LinkedIn has been a sleeper tool in my bag of tricks. When I say sleeper, that’s to be read as “ignored”.

The premise is so sim­ple: Join. Invite your peers. Meet their peers. That’s it — so sim­ple. It’s some­thing that the busi­ness break­fasts have been work­ing on for years and years, net­work­ing clubs that strive to fos­ter the face to face net­work to expand pro­fes­sional rela­tion­ships. But what LinkedIn dri­ves by lever­ag­ing some rad­i­cally sim­ple tech­nol­ogy is vol­ume.

I made a point to invite 15 peo­ple. Ten of them signed up quickly. Of those folks, four of them had exist­ing net­works. Of those four, two of them had been very active users, with 300+ net­works each by them­selves. The sys­tem did the math and deter­mined that with my users my total net­work went from 1 (me) to over 20,000 in just a short week.

I jumped in and ran some searches on my sec­ond and third degree net­works and found a num­ber of folks that I already knew — acquain­tances and friends — and added them to my direct con­tact list. Then, I searched for like minded peo­ple.

My major project was to find peo­ple who are in a sim­i­lar posi­tion to mine, to start net­work­ing with them, learn­ing about this whole new media thing, how to for­mal­ize some­thing that has yet to be truly archi­tected as a func­tion of mar­ket­ing and pub­lic rela­tions. I found three peo­ple very will­ing to rec­i­p­ro­cate and thus, my net­work is born. The pay­off was quick, the expe­ri­ence uni­ver­sally pos­i­tive, the scope vast.

I imag­ine the trick will be keep­ing it going. There’s a lot of energy around these new expe­ri­ences and build­ing a net­work like this is akin to a non-drug induced high. Once the buzz is gone, will the pay­off stick?

And such is my pri­mary puz­zle; charged with build­ing a vir­tual net­work of nearly a half of a mil­lion peo­ple, how do you cre­ate last­ing buzz and value in a com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel that is strong enough to last? At this point, I’m tak­ing a page from Joe Trippi, that a vir­tual net­work is only as good as the inher­ent oppor­tu­ni­ties for real life meet-ups. As much as we say we’re a vir­tual soci­ety, as much as we like to think that the 80% of Amer­i­cans on the net are actu­ally using it to it’s poten­tial, I think peo­ple want to touch one another at a very base level. We are the cul­ture of the handshake.