I received an invitation to join LinkedIn a while back and hadn’t really thought much about it until someone else emailed me about it. Is it any good? Do you use it? were the two questions – which resulted in the answers (1) I don’t know and (2) no!

If you’re a networking fanatic it might be worth looking at LinkedIn. It does offer opportunities to get hold of people in other areas of work, and it does seem to be popular. According to the website “Your professional relationships are key to your success. Our [LinkedIn's] mission is to help you be more effective using the relationships you already have”. It’s then followed up with “This isn’t networking — it’s what networking should be”! Although one could simply call it entreprenuer’s reunited.

You can sign up as a user straightaway, or wait until you’re invited to join, perhaps by someone who hasn’t any friends already listed and wants to look popular. Once signed in you can make contact with the contacts of your contacts via an invite/introduction. Or you can do what I guess most people do and mull around for a bit, then invite people to join who aren’t involved so that it makes you look popular.

Strangely you also get invites to become contacts with people who you’ve never heard of, or know what they do, and in some cases care what they do! Add them to your contacts and you gain a few more contacts provided they do the intros. 

Confused? Good, because it’s a tad bit confusing. Why look for a contact at an organisation through LinkedIn when you can easily look up a contact via search engines and go to a company direct? Why use LinkedIn when you can just simply email someone and introduce yourself? There must be something in it though as the site claimed 4.8million people have joined… probably all looking to contact each other to see who’s top of the popularity polls.

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