Back in March wrote a post, actually more of an invitation, about connecting to me on LinkedIn. At the time I was approaching 4 million people in my network. I had gotten the idea from my good friend Dave "El Dave" Mendoza. He has a post where he invites people to connect to him on LinkedIn. Since then my network has grown by almost one million people. I’ve decided that it makes sense for me to run an update on my original story and offer.
So here is my offer, connect to me on LinkedIn, if you haven’t already. When you do, you should be able to contact a ton of people as my network of reachable professionals is approaching 5 million. I’ve already managed to be helpful in connecting dozens of career professionals who needed introductions.
Connecting isn’t really about what you can do for me; in fact it isn’t about what I can do for you. No, connecting is more about what we can all do for each other. Shally Steckerl, Master Cybersleuth, has a great post about being a promiscuous linker. It is a great read and Shally does a wonderful job of explaining why connecting to folks that you don’t know well can help your network become much more efficient. And efficiency translates into usefulness. You can also find a great post about using LinkedIn to help promote your personal brand, over at my friend Jason (not related to Jessica) Alba’s site JibberJobber.
Click to connect to Carl Chapman on LinkedIn. – use my email address carl @ cecsearch.com.
Or you can send me an invite to join your network by using Carl Chapman and my email address "carl @ cecsearch.com"
If you’d like to be promoted on my blog when I do updates of this post just drop me a line. About once a month I’ll do an article inviting people to connect to me and I’d be happy to included links to any of my readers who are open networkers.
Finally, since I mentioned Jason Alba, now here’s a new picture of Jessica.
Carl,
Keep in mind that anyone who connects to you is only going to get your 2nd level contacts in their network.
That being said, I’m at about the same point you are [invitations to danielrsweet-at-gmail.com] and I have about 700K 2nd level connections.
So, if anyone here connects to either of us, they’re going to get a huge boost in networking, but it won’t be 5mil.
Unless, of course, Jessica Alba is one of your connections…
Dan
Hi Daniel, I understand that they won’t get my 3rd degrees as contacts that are directly reachable, but with an introduction, they can ‘connect’ through me. 😉
Carl,
My understanding is that your 2nd level will become their 3rd level and they won’t be able to see your 3rd level at all (in order to even know that they need an introduction).
Is that wrong? I can never tell with all of the changes at LinkedIn.
Dan
Dan, heck I don’t know, they keep restricting my account for no dang good reason so I have no idea what the heck is goning on. 🙂