On Nov 13, 2007 12:06 AM, Andy Lester <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Nov 12, 2007, at 3:51 PM, Uri Guttman wrote: > > > AL> What are you basing that on? Do you know anyone who has done > > so? I > > AL> would love to hear stories of this happening. > > > > we will find out soon enough. > > > No, I meant using LinkedIn for networking with new people, not just > the PM group. > > As far as I can see, LinkedIn is all about networking existing people > a la Facebook, and I have yet to hear of anyone who has found anyone > else via LinkedIn. > > That's the kind of story I'm looking for.
As I can see these are at least two different issues. 1) I have seen several requests to contact with other going through my node. Most of them were would be employers who wanted to get in touch with specific users. Some of them were the would be employees who wanted to "sell themself" to an employer. I don't know about the results as I have not checked that with either side. 2) I have seen the same as above but for consulting services - that is when you are not looking for employment. Personally I have used it many times to get in touch with clients both as a Perl trainer and for marketing my QA Automation services, specifically the QA Day: http://www.pti.co.il/qa_day.html While I don't have a huge statistics, it seems to be more effective than cold calling potential clients. I was contacted by at least one company - Google - checking if I was interested in working for them. I wasn't. They were using the direct messaging feature and not the 'send through a contact feature' which might be faster and you can reach more people but which lacks the reference part. 3) It is definitely not for 'making new friends' or contacting people just for fun. It is geared towards business contacts including employment. I even tried to recommend this on PerlMonks http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=645950 as a way of helping each other, with very little success Maybe my explanation was not good. 4) I have seen people looking up contacts via LinkedIn and when they notice I have direct contact to the "target person" they ask me to give them their phone number. In such cases I usually ask the "taget person" if it is ok to give out the phone number, but usually it is. So these people use LinkedIn only to locate the right contact and not actually to reach her. Again, I think this group José setup on LinkedIn will be able to help us a lot. First by making this tool more accepted in the Perl community. Second, when you are looking for an employment in company X, if you find a Perl monger in that company you might know who is capable to evaluate your CPAN life etc. in that company. Even if you don't know that person personally. regards Gabor -- Gabor Szabo http://www.szabgab.com/ Perl Training in Israel http://www.pti.co.il/ Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=82476
