Thank You Linkedin, For Making Me Feel Special.

I recently received an email from Linkedin congratulating me on having one of the top 1% of viewed profiles in 2012 across the entire Linkedin network. Pretty impressive right?  I sure felt special. I also wondered how that was even possible, that I could be in the top 1%. I kind of had a warm feeling come over me, and I started to walk a little taller. Then I read that Linkedin had just broken the 200 million-member milestone and my warm and fuzzy feeling went away. Fast.

Who wouldn't feel special?

My inner math-whiz took over for a minute. If I’m in the top 1% of 200 million, that makes me one of two million other people who got the same email. For about 5 minutes, two million people were just a little prouder. It’s not a very exclusive club. Mensa, for example has 110,000 members across the world. That’s a much more exclusive club. There’s even a club called the Ejection Tie Club. It’s made up of military pilots who have hit the ejection switch in their aircraft and lived to tell about it. 5,607 members world-wide. That’s way more exclusive than Mensa, but then, the initiation is kind of a bitch. They also get matching ties.

Live through this, join the club, get a nifty tie.

 So they truly have some marketing genius at Linkedin (perhaps a member of Mensa) who came up with this idea of acknowledging the membership with these “you’re special” emails. I know they went out the top 1%, top 5%, and top 10% of the membership. If you’re in the top 10%, that puts you into a super-exclusive club of 20 million people. That’s almost two thirds the size of Canada, and roughly the size of Norway, Denmark, Finland and Ireland combined. Congratulations, we’re all special!  It’s a brilliant idea. They created tremendous buzz around the Linkedin community for the last couple of weeks.

I’ve written about it before, but Linkedin has really become a major part of my working day. In my view, it’s made the rolodex completely obsolete. This once private asset of sales and business people who traded on the value of the names in their rolodexes, has now become a public, online measure of their networking prowess and success. For some people, it’s even become a competition to see how fast they can amass contacts. I have a rule that I have to know the person before I’ll reach out to connect. I may have broken that rule once or twenty times on my own quest to break the 500 contacts mark.

Before blackberries and Linkedin, salespeople had Rolodexes, and they were your currency.

I know that today, I won’t even interview someone for a sales or relationship job that doesn’t have an active Linkedin presence. In the old days, you had to hire a salesperson to find out how connected they were…take a big chance that they really knew who they said knew. Today, it takes about three clicks to see if they’re serious, and one more click tells you how connected you are with them and their network. It makes the pre-work so much easier. I don’t interview anybody that I haven’t checked out on Linkedin. I truly don’t care what’s happening on somebody’s Facebook page (even though I appreciate a good picture of a deer mother nursing a bear cub as much as the next guy), but I absolutely care what’s going on with Linkedin.

I know there are lots of people who don’t use Linkedin like me. Some don’t even use it at all. I get that many people have careers for whom networking isn’t nearly as important in their day to day work as it is for other people, so I get their hesitance in jumping onboard the Linkedin train. But for sales and relationship people, I’m boggled by it.

Linkedin tells me what they care about at work, and how they communicate. It gives me a sense of how they work in a changing social media climate. It tells me how they manage their relationships, and it gives me a good sense of how we’re going to gel. All this before we’ve had the first live conversation. I’m sure it’s not really the right way to do it, but a candidate without Linkedin doesn’t make it to my shortlist. I imagine I’ve probably let some good people slide by, but if we’re going to hit it off, it’s going to start with Linkedin. It’s like e-Harmony for business.

It's like online dating...come on baby, woo me with your contacts.