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Curt Monash

The Short, Linked-In Life of Rob Carpenter

7 comments

IT TOPICS:Business Intelligence, Careers, Management, Software

Mark Hall thinks LinkedIn is essentially useless. I think LinkedIn is great, but not for the advertised purposes. So we actually don't disagree much at all.

LinkedIn claims that its whole point is to create chains of connections between people who know and trust each other. But that's not the reality of how it works; at least, it's not the only reality. Some people even appoint themselves as LinkedIn "hubs", and openly post email contact information, encouraging anybody and everybody to link to them. I noticed this, and last Saturday I started a little experiment.

28 or so of the people in my network with the most links post email addresses on their profiles. A fellow named Rob Carpenter contacted each of them, saying nothing more than "Hi! I'd love to link with you on LinkedIn." His profile simply said that he was a "Universal Contact Guy." His return email address, incongruously, was curtmonash@(something).com.

As of this writing, 17 of those people have agreed to link with Rob Carpenter. His "network" now constitutes over half of all LinkedIn members, and indeed is somewhat larger than mine.

As you've probably guessed if you've read this far, Rob Carpenter is a fictional character -- a figment of my imagination. Even so, he now is proven, according to LinkedIn boilerplate propaganda, to have a trusted direct or indirect relationship with over half the membership.

Yeah, right.

TRIVIA QUESTION (with apologies to the many real Robert Carpenters):

Who was the IT industry's first fictional Rob Carpenter?

The first person (real or imaginary) to post the correct answer in a comment here will achieve recognition and, in an admittedly limited way, perpetual glory.

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If a contact I know very

Submitted by Richard Upton on July 15, 2005 - 7:22 P.M.

If a contact I know very well forwards me a request with a note saying that he or she strongly endorses the person orginating the request, then I'm more likely to accept the request. The fact that there are weak connections in within the LinkedIn database has no effect and is therefore irrelevant to the beneficial scenario above. So to me, LinkedIn is valuable for its trusted connections regardless of how some may use it.

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Mostly good experience with

Submitted by Devans00 on June 3, 2005 - 10:15 P.M.

Mostly good experience with LinkedIn. It's a GIGO scenario. If you input garbage like creating a fake profile with no intention of being serious, then you should expect to get garbage out.

I've used LinkedIn for:

- Getting contacted about potential jobs - including getting a job from a recruiter that found me on LinkedIn
- Finding job leads
- Connecting to others in my profession
- Passing along job leads and other contact requests
- Contacting people who work at places I was going for job interviews to get the inside scoop

The benefits far out weigh the minor annoyance of people trying to add you to their network even though they don't know you.

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I find LinkeDin to be a

Submitted by Gary on June 3, 2005 - 3:05 A.M.

I find LinkeDin to be a distraction and a waste of time for me so far. Maybe if I were to invest more time in it I might see some benefit. The problem is that I KNOW I will benefit from putting time into my real-world network of contacts. From my point of view, it's a failed experiment. Time to move on.

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The Rob Carpenter example

Submitted by Curt Monash on June 2, 2005 - 5:58 P.M.

The Rob Carpenter example actually proves this point: The level of endorsement one can presume from a contact arriving through LinkedIn is very low.

This was an extreme case, but for a variety of reasons I judge that to be true even for more conventional contacts. However, I concede that that argument needs to be carefully justified, rather than just asserted.

Anyhow, what the Rob Carpenter example proves, at an understated minimum, is this: Over half of the members of LinkedIn are connected to at least one working contact with whom they do NOT have a continual chain of serious trust -- at no more than three hops from the fictional Rob Carpenter, and at no more than two hops from somebody who willingly linked to him.

CAM

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Totally agree that within

Submitted by Konstantin Guericke on June 2, 2005 - 7:18 P.M.

Totally agree that within one's LinkedIn network of four degrees, there are likely to be some people who have weak connections to you. However, they are a very small percentage of our overall user base, and this is precisely why we don't allow people to contact each other without a referral (though we allow users to opt into people contacting them without referral, in which case it is their choice).

So, while your connections should be people you know and trust, there is no implication that any of the people your contacts know (or people 3rd and 4th degree) are your trusted connections. They are just people who your trusted conntections can help you reach. And that's why they can't contact you directly--they have to get a referral.

So, when someone contacts you and it goes through one of these people who don't have a strong relationship with their connections, you can usually tell by what they write when they forward a request.

If someone says "I worked with X at Y company for Z years, and he would be a great persont to work for", I definitely factor this in and am signifcantly more likely to accept the contact request.

However, when I get a weak referral like "just passing it on" or "maybe you are interested", I usually decline or ask my contact for clarification from his or her contact (unless the request "stands on his own" and I'd accepted it even if the person had emailed it to me without an intro).

Typically, my own connections will not forward a contact request to me that does not have a strong endorsement from the person who knows the sender since there is no trusted referral that adds value and they don't want to take up my time.

And if they do, I tend to give them feedback and they then don't do it anymore (which is how it works in real life when someone asks me to meet someone and is not choiceful in who they introduce to me).

So, your own connections are your shield (in addition your bridge to opportunity), and you reap what you sow on LinkedIn. We do find occasionally that some users disconnect from people who turned out to be too liberal in accepting connections or don't add value when they introduce people to them.

So, if any of you start seeing good connections drop you after you accept invitations from strangers (and forward requests without meaningful endorsements), you may want to think about whether it isn't better to stick to connections you know and trust :-)

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Rob Carpenter has proven

Submitted by Konstantin Guericke on June 2, 2005 - 5:24 P.M.

Rob Carpenter has proven that 19 of LinkedIn's 2.7 million users are not using LinkedIn in the way it was intended. But I think the selection bias (and sample size) make this by no means a representative sample from which you can draw conclusion of what most people on LinkedIn do.

Only a tiny group of LinkedIn users put their email addresses on their profile and those who do typically accept all invitations (since that's why they put their email address on their profile) and have lots of connections. What is the median number of connections in your sample of people who accepted Rob's invitation? How does this compare to the median number of connections for your own connections?

Do you really think the people you picked are a representative sample and represent the typical LinkedIn user? If so, I'd beg to differ--we find that most users don't like to publish their email address and don't like to be connected to people they are not willing to recommend because they don't want to put their reputation on the line for strangers.

But some clearly do--I guess when you have 2.7 million users, you are bound to get people of all persuasions. I have had contact with people of this "link to anybody" philosophy, and I can say they love LinkedIn and mean well. They are just more open than others, which is not something I look for in my connections, but some people do. I do debate them pretty vigrously on the value of this approach.

We only close accounts of users who violate the user agreement--not for people using LinkedIn in a different way than we intended. Also, we mostly rely on users reporting on such behavior [in your case, you turned yourself in to our customer service :-)].

As a co-founder of LinkedIn, I can say that it happens on occasion that we have to close an account, but I've been pleasantly surprised how much most LinkedIn users keep their network to people they know and trust and abide by the user agreement. So, since every connection has to be confirmed by both sides, people make the bed they want to sleep in, and while LinkedIn encourages people to only connect with people they already know and trust, there is room to accomodate different work styles. And, to some extent, our product has evolved in response to how users are using LinkedIn.

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I found Linked-In to be a

Submitted by Anonymous on June 1, 2005 - 2:36 P.M.

I found Linked-In to be a total waste of time. I spent more time filling out my profile, and writing profiles for others, than actually getting any useful contacts from the site. Instead of a site like this I find that my personal contacts, and email, are the best way to build professional networks.

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