So here’s a benefit of having joined twitter – I now see some of the things that other people forward;-)
And one in particular got to me, and inspired me to give you three good reasons to avoid “top 10 lists”.
Drum roll please…
#3 – It isn’t that simple
For every tip you might get, you’re left looking for an explanation that makes sense.
Yes, you want to use LinkedIn to get a job, and yes you’ve got to connect to people, build your profile, and develop a personal brand.
But I think you knew that already…
Ok – here’s my one hedge – Guy Kawasaki wrote “Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn” three years ago, and it remains a very good article to read. (notice he didn’t call it a “top 10” list;-)
#2 – You might not get the context
I found a reasonable list of ways to work with LinkedIn by Patrice Reid at “Ten Top Tips LinkedIn” and finishing off the second point – “Build your Profile” – is the bullet “100% Profile Completeness”.
As I wrote in 2008 in the article “Reaching for 100” – that is a completely bogus statistic.
If that’s how you need to motivate yourself to use LinkedIn more – then perhaps it has a slightly positive spin, but it is absolutely not something that people should worry about.
Leaving it there all by itself leaves an impression that it is important.
But that’s not all…
#3 – You could get just plain old bad advice
And this is where I started off this article…
The suggested link was telling me to read “How To Start Your Job Search 2.0 – LinkedIn” – so I did.
And there in the middle of it is this advice
“Tip #3: Use a separate email address for LinkedIn. Why? As you become successful, in virally marketing your SME, your email could blow up. I like to time block my LinkedIn correspondence all at once, and using a separate email address allows easy organization (a trick from Getting Things Done). Get your new email account before signing up, because it will be more difficult to redirect the email later.“
Which is not just not-so-very-helpful, it might in fact cause an individual very specific problems – it is a very bad thing to do.
So much email that you’ll find it a nuisance?
Ok – so if you’re connecting to people that you know and trust, you expect to receive such an overwhelming amount of email that you can’t keep up with it?
Come on – that’s so far fetched as to be unbelieveable.
Oh – but if you’re connecting to every Tom, Dick, and Harry, why then yes, you might find yourself the recipient of junk mail…
Organizing email?
If you don’t know how to sort email by sender or subject, please take some time to figure out how to do it. You don’t need to send email to a special address to get everything related to LinkedIn separated into a special folder.
Ignoring the advice to add every email to your account.
And lastly – while on the topic of email, this top ten list ignores the single biggest problem that LinkedIn suffers – that people create multiple accounts because LinkedIn doesn’t know userA@work.com from userA@homeISP.com – and creates a second account when accessed with the wrong email address.
(And you’re going to read my article on how to manage that issue, right? Go here to find out how to add multiple email addresses to your account)
Old news
I published an article last December about Where to Send Your LinkedIn Email – but apparently Bill over at Employment Digest didn’t get the memo.
My article lists a couple more reasons to get your LinkedIn email at your primary address – because people might want to reach you about important matters – like getting a job, making a sale, or closing a business deal.
And really – how often are you going to be checking that “LinkedIn only” email account you setup…
Who’s been overwhelmed with LinkedIn email
Ok – let me hear from you – what level of email do you get from LinkedIn? Has it ever been a problem? If you say anything over “just a small amount”, I’d like you to include your current number of connections and connecting philosophy, because with over 300 connections, I don’t get more than a trickle, and the ones that I get, I’m generally interested in.
So – Just because someone has published a top ten list doesn’t mean that the advice is sound. They’ve just figured out that articles that mention “top ten” happen to get attention…
To your continued success,
steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock
Hi, Steve.
Great post. I agree that you should use your primary email for the reasons you state. I’m closing in on 800 connections and don’t get an unmanageable number of LI message traffic.
What *does* bog down my Inbox are all of the notices and digests from the groups I’m a member of. For a while I just used a Gmail filter to move them all unread to my Archive, where I could read them (maybe) as time permitted.
And there are a few Rochester area networking groups that generate heavy email traffic (these, too, have been banished directly to my Archive to be read as time permits).
Use of filters keeps my Inbox traffic low enough where I can see and promptly respond to the emails that are more important.
Best regards,
Chris
Chris,
Thanks for the data point!
For the group messages – if they are not as useful as you might like, go ahead and turn them off. Each group is controlled individually under the Group -> More… -> My Settings area. Uncheck the “Digest Email” if you don’t ever want to see it.
Speaking of which, there are a couple groups I’m thinking of doing that for…-)
But yes – filtering messages to separate folders is a good thing to do. I have an in-between step where I auto-label the messages in gmail, but let them into the inbox – two clicks to look and archive, and no hunting around to label them.
steve