Читать книгу Windmill Networking: Understanding, Leveraging & Maximizing LinkedIn - Neal Schaffer - Страница 18

Since you have come this far, I assume you are ready to roll up your sleeves and begin making connections, starting with those in your immediate physical network. LinkedIn has made this very easy for you by providing the “Add Connections” functionality. You can access this function by clicking on the big green “Add Connections” button, which is near the bottom of the left-hand sidebar. Upon concluding this exercise, based on the size of your physical network, you will already be on your way to building a network of tens and perhaps hundreds of connections!

If you are new to LinkedIn, your profile will display that you have no connections here when you access this screen. The following options appear under four different tabs on this page:

Invite Contacts

If you know the first and last name, as well as email address, of someone you want to add, you can directly input this information here. This is not the most efficient way of adding people as it is extremely time consuming. Imagine if you have a database of several hundred contacts. You would need to input their first name, last name, and email address, all in separate fields, for several hundred contacts! It is also far from error-proof, as email addresses of people you know may have changed. I do not think this option is used very often, unless you wish to invite only a few people at a time.

Import Contacts – Check Webmail

This is the tab you will find the most useful. If you have a webmail account from Microsoft (Hotmail/WindowsLive), Yahoo, Google, AOL or a select group of “other” providers, LinkedIn will log into your account after you enter a valid username and password. LinkedIn will then present you with a list of your contacts in alphabetical order, giving you the option to immediately invite everyone in your address book. This is probably how you got that initial invitation to join LinkedIn!

Before you get excited about finding a few hundred potential connections here, be warned that LinkedIn is looking at your entire address book. If you are a Google Mail user, for instance, this will include pretty much anyone you have ever emailed, regardless if they are a LinkedIn member or not!

You may not want to invite all of these people (or companies that you have contacted in the past) to your LinkedIn network, depending on your LinkedIn Objective. Be extra careful, as LinkedIn will show you current LinkedIn members as well as those who are not yet on LinkedIn. Only those with the blue “in” symbol on the far right are active LinkedIn members. For reasons we will discuss later in this book, if you are tempted to start inviting people, I highly recommend that you start by only inviting those in your address book who already have a LinkedIn account. If you don’t have many contacts to go through, I suggest right clicking and visiting the profiles of these people to see how active they are on LinkedIn. If they only have a few connections, they may not be very active on LinkedIn, and thus your invitation may be “wasted” or underutilized. You may want to save the invitations for these people for a later date when they (I hope) get more active on LinkedIn. You will learn later in this book that your invitations are a limited resource, so learn early to use them wisely!

Import Contacts – Other Address Book

If you have your contacts in a database or contact management application such as Outlook, Act!, Palm Desktop, etc., AND if you can export these contacts into a .csv, .txt, or .vcf format, you can easily import your contacts into LinkedIn just as you did with Webmail. The same warning about being somewhat selective with your invitations applies here.

Import Contacts – Enter Contacts Manually

Sends you back to the “Invite Contacts” screen.

Colleagues

For every company you listed in your profile (whether you still work for them or used to work for them) you can now search for your present and former colleagues. LinkedIn displays the first 50 colleagues that are closest to your network, based on the company name as well as the years during which you worked at the company. After using this multiple times, you get to the point where you don’t know any of the 50 people recommended to you; by pressing the “I Don’t Know Anyone Here” tab, LinkedIn will recommend 50 new people to you. You will also notice if you return to this page in the future, you will have the option to search again from scratch (“View All”) or search those who haven’t been introduced to you yet (“Find New”). LinkedIn will also list the date you last searched for colleagues. You always have the option to use the “Advanced Search” functionality to manually search for people based on title or where they are current employees (which I will discuss in the “Finding People to Connect With Using Advanced Search” section later in this chapter). In addition, this “Colleagues” section is an excellent place to find potential connections from your past and present workplaces.

Classmates

For every school you listed in the “Education” section of your profile, you will now have the opportunity to search for classmates. Furthermore, with each school you list, you can further narrow down your search by years the students attended. If you are looking for people within your specific graduating class, LinkedIn will also conduct this more specific search for you.

When you explore the tabs I reviewed above, I recommend you send Invitations with a personal note to all of your present and former colleagues, classmates, and friends and family. By doing so, you are well on your way to quickly adding anywhere from tens to a few hundred connections to your LinkedIn profile!

Congratulations! You have completed the first step in utilizing LinkedIn to meet your objective, whatever that may be. Whether your objective is to connect to old friends or to find your next big job, the first step is undoubtedly making connections; by doing so, you are plugging yourself into the Windmill Networking grid. Now that you understand the invitation functionality, you will be able to start further expanding your LinkedIn network.