I Am Linked In
By Erik Murphy – VP, Operations
Yes, I have unwittingly joined the social network ranks and have become Linked In. So now what? I am still not sure what I am supposed to do with all these connections. It is not like I didn’t already know these people’s email addresses or important details about them.
As far as I can tell, so far, is that it is an online popularity contest. Who will acknowledge me as their friend and how many people can I get to do that? I admit to getting caught up in that, although even with my competitive nature I have only amassed 31 connections.
In brainstorming ideas to improve our Murphy & Associates systems a few years back I came up with an idea we eventually called “Six Degrees of Joe Bales”. I basically wanted to create a Murphy & Associates social network and track who knows who and how. I thought this might be useful for people when looking for a new job or a referral. We could even tie it into the skills that people had to create a forum where people could post question and rely on the M&A network to offer solutions.
We have a priority list for our development tasks. A special priority has been created for many of my ideas: “9 – Cool Idea”. Six degrees of Joe Bales remains at the cool idea priority, but from my standpoint this would be a social network that would be useful. Perhaps we can leverage Linked In in some way to accomplish the same thing. In the meantime if you are looking to boost your number of connections, I will probably respond yes if I know you, but don’t expect much after that.
Comments