First, a caveat … I’m by no means an expert on social media or ‘business’ social media.
I’m just going to tell you some observations I’ve made over the past few weeks.
Lately I’ve been getting requests to connect, on LinkedIn, from people I’ve never met … and have no idea who they are.
Most of the time, the requests simply state
I’d like to connect with you on LinkedIn.
Obviously this gives me no information on who you are or why I would want to connect with you.
As a rule, I don’t ‘connect’ with someone unless I truly know them.
The only exception to that rule is when someone is a co-worker.
My advice … when you want to connect with someone, make sure you tell them WHY in your message.
If you try to connect with me … and I don’t know you … I’ll ignore the request and mark it as “I don’t know …”. This gives you an internal ding in LinkedIn’s systems.
According to LinkedIn’s help …
When you click the “I don’t know this person” link after clicking Ignore, this prevents the person you don’t know from reinviting you in the future. If someone receives an excessive number of “I don’t know this person” responses, they could be restricted from sending invitations to connect to others.
So, if you do want to connect with me, please take the time to explain WHY you want connect with me.
Funny coincidence. I just called out on that at the conference I am at in a social media presentation. I linked in to the the person running social media for all of Oracle who was doing the JDE Summit conference. We were re-tweeting each others tweets during the conference so I invited her in LinkedIn. I typically do a personal note, but was on my IPAD and did not get the option. #FAIL #UX of LInked app on iPAD
A lot of the bogus connection requests and other crap seemed to be related to membership in LinkedIn groups. I rarely participated in any of the groups, so I just dropped out of all of them.
Whether or I mark a declined connection request as “I don’t know …” depends on whether or not we have any mutual connections and maybe I should know them. (There are three signs of old age: failing vision, failing memory, and … I can’t remember the other one!)
Ken
I’ve found that a number of the connection requests I get are from people who are just trying to connect with members of the online community that they perceive as important.