Your Invitation To Connect On LinkedIn

I invite you to consider using a free service called LinkedIn, and network with me and my network of five million professionals.  See my LinkedIn profile at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/backgroundnow.

Visit the LinkedIn flash presentation for a useful tour of what LinkedIn is about.  Additionally, refer to this blog or contact me directly for assistance in getting the most out of this service -- helping others via LinkedIn offers a great ROI and I am glad to assist.

To register and connect with me, go to http://www.linkedin.com.  Click on "Join Now" and register.  Once you are a registered LinkedIn user, locate my profile, click on "Add Lee to your network.", then enter my email address in the field provided.  My email address is [Lee@informednetworks.com].

LinkedIn has been a source of new business, interesting contacts and even a Wall Street Journal interview for me.  If you put forth effort into developing a LinkedIn network I believe you too will be pleased with the results.  Feel free to contact me if you'd like to discuss growing your network.

LinkedIn is a business oriented site mainly used for professional networking. As of January 2007, it had more than 9 million registered users, spanning 150 industries. All 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. In fact, 499 of them are represented by director-level and above employees.   It is a fact that 13 people join LinkedIn every minute.

LinkedIn is particularly useful when you are looking for a job or recruiting. Knowing someone who works in the same division of a company you are interested in can help you get background information or get your resume to the right person. Nowadays, when someone asks me for contacts, I tell them to join LinkedIn, connect with me there and search my contacts. They use the system to send my contacts a message via me, then I then judiciously decide whether to forward the message or not. There have been some cases when I have declined to forward messages where the contact would not be appropriate.

Here's what Guy Kawasaki has to say in his blog "How To Change The World: Ten Ways To Use LinkedIn": http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/ten_ways_to_use.html

And Business 2.0 Magazine article on LinkedIn: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/12/01/8394967/

7,407 people have voted in a poll:
69.43% have found LinkedIn to be useful.
20.16% have not.
10.41% not a member.

Hope to connect with you at LinkedIn.

Best wishes,

Lee Hill :: Informed Networks Corporation :: http://www.backgroundnow.com ::

P.S. Stan Relihan, a recruiter in Sydney with 5,000+ LinkedIn connections,  describes his LinkedIn experience:  http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_gdayworld_20070328_219.mp3

Other LinkedIn References: Wikipedia's LinkedIn Entry : LinkedIn In BusinessWeek : LinkedIn CNN Money Article : LinkedIn Becomes the Yellow Pages : PC Mag LinkedIn Review : Who's Reading Your LinkedIn Profile : Etiquette For LinkedIn : LinkedIn, Anyone? : LinkedIn in Marketwatch : LinkedIn Looks To Ebay : LinkedIn Looks To Grow : LinkedIn Is On The Job : The Monster Dilemma : ZoomInfo vs. LinkedIn : LinkedIn Gets Down To Business : Why Bother With LinkedIn? : LinkedIn Job Search Best Practices : LinkedIn, So Popular Nobody Goes There Anymore? : My Link Wiki for LinkedIn : LinkedIn... Can Hence Job Searches : LinkedIn, A Little Help From Your Friends : LinkedIn, Corporate Inter Face Time : LinkedIn's Service Provider Feature : LinkedIn Adds Group Features : LinkedIn And IT Staffing : LinkedIn Wants To Suggest A Plumber : LinkedIn, Site Of The Week : LinkedIn Launches Paid Service For Groups : LinkedIn And Your Job Search : LinkedIn Worth A Quarter Of A Billion? : LinkedIn, Adding Connections By Fishing In A Bucket : LinkedIn For Startup Entrepreneurs : Top Ten LinkedIn Do's And Don'ts : LinkedIn Reaches Out : LinkedIn Expands : Execs Use LinkedIn : Pressing Employees To Share LinkedIn Connections : LinkedIn, How To Win Friends... : LinkedIn And Your Next Job : LinkedIn Reaches 10 Million Users : LinkedIn, Webby Awards Nominee :

"LinkedIn—the online professional site that's partly a social network and partly a virtual business card exchange—allows its 9 million users to list their connections to other site members on their profile page. So which members are the most linked in? Ranked by employer, those who work at salesforce.com (CRM) and Google (GOOG) (on average, 48 connections), says LinkedIn spokesperson Kay Luo. The site boasts 130,000 recruiters, but the most-connected users by job title are founders and CEOs (76), followed by board members (74), and, a bit further down, MBA students (44), who outlink senior recruiters.

School ties also matter. Students and graduates of Stanford business school have an average of 60 connections, followed by those from MIT's Sloan School (58), and Harvard Business School (57). And LinkedIn says the top-growing industries among new users include arts and crafts, libraries, and fitness."

—Lauren Young and Paula Lehman