You have been very helpful to all of us, and if you want a tutorial on how to use LinkedIn to your benefit, call me at 617-PATRICK, and I will help you out. However, here are a few reasons to use it:

1) Contact old friends and colleagues.

They may not have their own web page, but they may be in LinkedIn. They may also be in Facebook.

2) Keep a “moving” Rolodex.

If people change jobs, and you are connected to them with LinkedIn, they will eventually change their address in their profile, so you will be able to keep in contact with them when they switch jobs and email addresses.

3) Learn who knows who.

Imagine that you have 50 connections, and each of them had 50 connections. Your 2nd level network would contain 2,500 connections (unless there was some overlap).

Now, if you were looking for a job at EMC, you can see if your 1st level connections or 2nd level connections (“friends of friends”) work at EMC. To do this, you put the name EMC into the “Search people” field in the upper right hand corner of your LinkedIn page. It will show you which 1st and 2nd level connections work there. Click on one of their profiles, and you can see if they work at EMC now or if they worked there previously.

If you are looking at the profile for a 2nd level connection, you can see which 1st level connection knows them by clicking on their profile and looking on the right hand side to see who you know that knows this EMC employee.

This 3rd reason is the true power of LinkedIn, and is unique to LinkedIn vs Facebook or any others. You can see if any of your 2500 “friends of friends” works for a company that you want to do business with. This was impossible to do years ago, and can be done in a few seconds today.

If you believe that “Its not what you know but who you know”, LinkedIn can help you find who knows who. Who knew?

Pat O’Malley
(617)-PATRICK
http://www.the-linkedin-speaker.com/blog/

I’m still not fully sold on Facebook, though I do have a page there now. Problem is, I just have so much time – and there are a lot of other things that I give priority over maintaining a Facebook page. That could change.

I like having a LinkedIn profile because (for now) it’s one of the first things to come up if you Google me, and I like knowing that it’s a picture I’ve painted of myself. That being said, it is as limited as any resume — and more so for some of my connections who’ve barely filled out their own profiles.

Mostly it just satisfies my curiosity about where people are working and where they’ve been. And no, I haven’t requested any recommendations for the same reasons you feel queasy about them! I’d rather ask when there is a specific need.

I’ve never liked MySpace; I find the layout hard to manage and a lot of other people’s profiles are just awful to look at. I have a page, but only because it directs people to where they can really find me — Facebook.

I’m liking Facebook more and more, though I have to say that the crossover between personal and professional (my boss ‘friended’ me! Agh!) is made easier by the fact that I never had any incriminating pictures on there to begin with. It will be interesting to see how my younger peers manage this transition… I don’t think they or we are aware of the implications yet. But that’s a whole other story.

If LinkedIn differentiated solicited recommendations from unsolicited ones, I think it would be more authentic. As it is, I don’t pay much attention to the recommendations either.