Colin's Blog My thoughts on everything.

The Value of LinkedIn

I've never understood the whole Facebook vs. LinkedIn debate.  I use both and there is very little overlap between my Facebook friends and my LinkedIn contacts. I don't believe they're even really competitors - I will continue to use both. Why? It's really quite simple.

 It's the same reason I didn't hand out my business card at my sister's baby shower, and I don't (usually) pass around photos of my family at business meetings.

But the real reason I'm writing this post is because Ahmed posted a very simple example of just how useful LinkedIn is - when you remember to use it!  I had actually just done a training session where I walked them through a scenario much like the one Ahmed describes.

To recap:  I need to find someone who works in function X at large corporation Y. Or, more interesting, someone who used to work at company Z. LinkedIn lets me punch in what I'm looking for and spits back extremely relevant results. So, if I were trying to get in touch with someone in public relations at, say, Facebook, I would get the following:

I think that's a pretty decent list of PR executives from a $15 billion company. Not insignificant is that LinkedIn also gives me a way to get in touch with those executives through my own network. Very handy indeed.

That training session I did last week also dealt with Facebook and one of the first questions I was asked (even before I did the LinkedIn search demo) was: "Can Facebook help me find friends of friends? You know, the six degrees thing?" The answer, of course, is "not really, unless you're willing to page though hundreds of your friends' friends."

I've written before that the 'killer' facebook feature for me is a way to explore my 2nd degree network in a controlled way.  I'm still waiting.

Related posts:

1. Facebook vs. LinkedIn (again)
2. LinkedIn Hack Lets You Add Strangers To Your Network
3. Social Media in Two Buckets
4. Wanted: Random Group Facebook App
5. LinkedIn Adds More Social Features