Yesterday I found an invitation in my inbox to become a member of a friend’s “professional network” via the professional-networking site LinkedIn.com. The first thought to run through my mind? Oh. God.
I’ll admit that I was quick to jump on the Friendster bandwagon back in the day: I really enjoyed reconnecting with many of my college friends and even a couple people from my high-school era. Not to mention the never-ending satisfaction that came in creating and recreating your own personal dust-jacket. It was like launching your own marketing strategy complete with personal Hallmark addendums. After a while, though, the site became less about a place to reconnect and maintain friendships and more about how many “friendsters” or testimonials you had. It began to feel like middle-school, which is the only other forum I’d previously encountered where people’s cliques, tastes and popularity were so blatantly on display for others to judge and dissect.
So, when everyone subsequently jumped over to MySpace I only half-heartedly followed suit. I never really engaged with that site, though, mainly because I felt the tone delve deeper into middle-school territory with personal-page “comments” that read more like really bad jokes and chain emails. I’ve also managed to resist the pull of FaceBook for precisely the opposite reasons: nothing is quite as uncool as joining a social-networking site that my mother could very well be a member of. God forbid she proves to be more popular than I would! Ha!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against these kinds of sites. I still keep my profiles up on Friendster and MySpace. After all, the birthday reminders from the former are invaluable and the pictures posted by friends on the latter are great to have. And I have joined other kinds of sites since my Friendster-crack days as well: I have profiles up on Yelp and Shelfari, etc. Although, unlike Friendster and MySpace, I joined these other sites anonymously with the use of initials and nicknames (as I have also done with this blog). I like to share my opinions, but I also don’t necessarily want just anyone to know they are mine.
Which brings me back to LinkedIn. As a professional networking site, LinkedIn differs from the others in that it is supposed to be used for business networking and the like. For example, you might find out that your friend has a friend who manages a venture capital firm and because you have mutual connection that VC-friend might be willing to look at your new business plan. Not to mention that you could do a little preparatory research on the people who will be interviewing you at the firm you would like to join—perhaps you could warm them up with talk of your mutual love of gardening? You get the idea. [In fact, to see all the ways that LinkedIn can help you and your professional career, check out this nicely written and (careful now) very persuasive plug here.]
But therein lies the rub: any research you can do on them, they can clearly do on you as well. And do you really want your (current or future) co-workers and employers to have ready access to that information? I mean, granted, they could find out more “damaging” things about you from Friendster and MySpace than they might from LinkedIn but even still it sort of makes me cringe to think about. Some things are better left as skeletons in my closet…even when those skeletons in my closet might just be lazy co-workers that I’m “connected” to and thus (to the people that also know the co-worker in question) inadvertently projecting a similarly lazy persona. And saying “no” to a connection invite would probably disrupt office politics, so there may not be an easy way around that. (For more about this, and a generally funny article, you should check this out.)
That said, I'm sure I'll be joining up with LinkedIn in the next couple of days or so. Afterall, the Fortune 500 companies are doing it. And I found my boss on there too. Ha!
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