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I’ve recently gotten into the professional networking site called LinkedIn. I’ve always been a slow adopter of social networking sites of any kind. I hesitated to join Facebook and still have not joined MySpace. One aspect of Facebook that I dislike is that any random person from your past can find you and commence the awkward wall posts, emails, or group invitations. I don’t necessarily feel the need to connect with everyone from my high school graduating class. I’m in the professional workforce now and I also don’t necessarily need the awkwardness of random people posting details to my wall. I think that is one aspect of LinkedIn that I like - all the people using it are, in theory, working professionals.

I’ve done lots of reading about LinkedIn of late. There are several good sites out there, including one blog in particular - Linked Intelligence - that offer advice on how to get the most out of LinkedIn. Everyone seems to agree: only request to add someone to your network or otherwise connect with them if you really know them well and they could speak about your as a person or a professional. This declaration goes against all my natural tendencies. You see, I’ve got a need, on any web community, to continually be adding people to my list of friends, buddies, or contacts. It doesn’t matter if it’s Twitter, Cork’d, LinkedIn, or LibraryThing, I always feel the burning desire to have as many contacts or friends as possible. LinkedIn is different, I’ve only connected with those whom I know or have worked with professionally.

Several articles I’ve read about LinkedIn state that you have to take it seriously for it to be of any use for you. In particular, one piece of advice from Penelope Trunk, career columnist at Yahoo! Finanace and the Blog “Brazen Careerist,” really seemed to hit home for me:

“Also, people send invitations to me that say something like, ‘Okay, I’m doing the LinkedIn thing.’ But it makes you look bad to invite someone to something you feel uncomfortable with…”

I have found myself doing exactly that when I send invites to people. I think it took a mental comparison of LinkedIn and Facebook for me to get more comfortable using former.

What am I rambling about? What does it all mean? In short, I think LinkedIn is worth it. You should check it out if you haven’t already. To close up, I’ll leave you with a collection of interesting and worthwhile reads about the profesional networking site.

• Ettiquete for LinkedIn
  
• Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn
• LinkedIn Profile Extreme Makeover
• 20 Ways to Use LinkedIn Productively
• Communicating with Your Connections: Spam or Networking?