Serious question: what do you do on linked in? What business value do you get?
I know several recruiters and speakers who use LinkedIn with great success. But outside of those two fields, most of the people I talk to use linkedin as a glorified rollodex and nothing more. I would be really interested in examples of what you have used it for.
It's more than a glorified rolodex, really. With LinkedIn you get much more of a "push" approach to business networking, whereas the rolodex and telephone model is much more "pull" based.
I can examine the profile of someone I've worked with before and know before I contact them if they know someone with whom I'd be interested in connecting. I can get notification that they are changing jobs, looking for work, or trying to find someone with a specialization, and they can notify other people at the same time. The rolodex and telephone model make this much harder, and so normally suchnotification happens far later, when you call to otherwise just keep in touch, unless the matter is otherwise extremely urgent.
It also serves as nice electronic substitute for resume and references. There's nothing for you to lose, and it allows you to update both in real time, avoiding the need to submit a new resume and list of references to potential employers whenever you want to add something new.
I know that at the last couple of places I've worked, part of the recruitment process was looking over my LinkedIn profile -- around the time I was being considered, I got notification that someone from the place I was applying had viewed my profile. I don't know whether it helped in my case, but I can't imagine they would even bother if it was always a waste of time.
Virtual business cards / online rolodex. When you're running a company your business contacts are super important. So every time that I get a business card in some context I look the people up on LinkedIn, then I can also see more about their background, and I don't have to worry about losing their card or adding them to my address book.
Incidentally, I didn't get LinkedIn before starting a business either. I'd even canceled my original account because I found the deluge of people that I saw at work every day adding me as a contact rather silly. Now, though, I use LinkedIn (or its European competitor, Xing) several times a week.
I have a LI account, but I don't use it effectively, so I can't speak from personal experience (which speaks to your point)
But I do believe businesses like Angstro could build a valuable business off LI (they could build it off FB too, but the value is much less obvious). This is, of course, an in theory statement, not an in practice one. Presumably LI could add Angstro like features themselves?
I've picked up a couple of consulting gigs through providing decent answers im the Answers section.
If I have a few moments spare at the end of the day, I'll look through open questions and answer them. Sometimes they are interesting questions that I would like to think through myself; sometimes they land directly in my area of expertise. But it's a win-win you help someone, and at the same time advertise that you are a reasonable, helpful guy who knows at least something about an area.
By comparison, I find Facebook completely pointless.
I've used it to look up customers, and people who work at various ISPs I was dealing with. I've also used it for the post-conference lookup to solidify connections that were made in person.
It's main utility to most people comes in the job hunting phase, but I've found it useful for building and maintaining weak ties with lots of people.
Both in job hunting and filling positions. It goes both ways. Rather than trying to capture everything social it has focused on just capturing the career network and doing it well. If I'm on LinkedIn it's for a reason: Jobs.
If I'm on Facebook it could be any number of reasons all of which probing raises privacy concerns.
Depends, like I said. I've used it both in job hunting and filling positions that are open. In the case where I was job hunting I did searches on the people who interviewed me either before (if I happened to know who I was meeting with) or after the interviews.
I even searched for people I didn't interview with, but were listed as having worked for the same company with similar job titles. It's a good way gauge the caliber of the people they've hired to work there.
I know several recruiters and speakers who use LinkedIn with great success. But outside of those two fields, most of the people I talk to use linkedin as a glorified rollodex and nothing more. I would be really interested in examples of what you have used it for.