June 8, 2010

In which I delete 4,000 LinkedIN Contacts

I’m expecting a flaming for this one but here goes. Last Thursday, the 3rd of June I deleted over 4,000 of my 1st level LinkedIn contacts bringing me down to a healthy 68 (see the profile here.)

Removing that many contacts is sure to frustrate some people though I feel I vetted out my contracts correctly. More importantly, why did I do this?

  • LinkedIn is a platform that works best when you have fewer, close contacts. When I joined LinkedIn many moons ago things were a little different, this was years before there were even profile pictures (there was so much hype behind that change by the way.) There were no Twitter’s, Facebook Fan Pages were not yet attracting enough professionals, LinkedIn was the place to be to make connections. Now I have tools such as Twitter, my blog and Facebook Pages to mass interact with my audience.
  • Most of this audience did not truly want to be connected anyway (flame away.) I’m not saying all Open Networkers are bad but a majority are address book collecters. Anybody who needs to promote that they have 8,000+ connections is 1) too ego-driven to work with me and 2) has way too many people in their core group to do any meaningful networking.
    • Because of this you can’t do business with most Open Networkers. They simply are not interested, play it as a collectors game, wonder you reach out to them or don’t see your message among everybody elses.
  • The spam was horrible. LinkedIN has few mass administration tools and people I barely knew were able to hit me with self-promotion questions and messages. Honestly, I wasn’t interested, if you want to promote be open about it. By the time I cleared my spam it was time to move on and I barely got time to interact.

Since deleting everybody my LinkedIn experience has been better and far more successful. I no longer accept invitations from everybody I know. We need to have a solid business relationship or have had profound talks at a conference to be connected there. Otherwise you will just have to deail with my Twitter, blog, phone and e-mail. Like my Facebook LinkedIn is now exclusive.

  • http://twitter.com/AspieAware Asperger’s Awareness

    I agree with your strategy here. The concept of LinkedIn is to connect with people you know very well – and who know you very well in order to get personal introductions to each others connections. Well, at least as personal as the web can be. I’ve also been the victim of sales solicitions via LinkedIn and have promptly disconnected from individuals who were clueless enough to use that tactic. Personally, I’ve even been a little annoyed at some of the material people post on the LinkedIn groups that’s overly sales pitchy. It just be relevant and useful or I’m outta there.I think you were right and smart to do what you did in order to make LinkedIn more fruitful. More power to you!

    • http://www.twitter.com/alexblom AlexBlom

      Thanks for dropping by and leaving a concept.

      The solicitations are horrible. The purpose of LinkedIN is to facilitate your closest connections and I’m glad you agree with me. The problem for me is when I joined there were few other mass communication options. Now there are I can use LinkedIN for what it was built for.

  • http://twitter.com/AspieAware Asperger's Awareness

    I agree with your strategy here. The concept of LinkedIn is to connect with people you know very well – and who know you very well in order to get personal introductions to each others connections. Well, at least as personal as the web can be.

    I've also been the victim of sales solicitions via LinkedIn and have promptly disconnected from individuals who were clueless enough to use that tactic. Personally, I've even been a little annoyed at some of the material people post on the LinkedIn groups that's overly sales pitchy. It just be relevant and useful or I'm outta there.

    I think you were right and smart to do what you did in order to make LinkedIn more fruitful. More power to you!

  • http://twitter.com/AspieAware Asperger's Awareness

    I agree with your strategy here. The concept of LinkedIn is to connect with people you know very well – and who know you very well in order to get personal introductions to each others connections. Well, at least as personal as the web can be.

    I've also been the victim of sales solicitions via LinkedIn and have promptly disconnected from individuals who were clueless enough to use that tactic. Personally, I've even been a little annoyed at some of the material people post on the LinkedIn groups that's overly sales pitchy. It just be relevant and useful or I'm outta there.

    I think you were right and smart to do what you did in order to make LinkedIn more fruitful. More power to you!

  • http://www.twitter.com/alexblom AlexBlom

    Thanks for dropping by and leaving a concept.

    The solicitations are horrible. The purpose of LinkedIN is to facilitate your closest connections and I'm glad you agree with me. The problem for me is when I joined there were few other mass communication options. Now there are I can use LinkedIN for what it was built for.

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