We are introducing SmartLinks to major media companies. Part of this exercise is of course finding the right people to approach in each company. For that we use LinkedIn.
How it works is this: I search for a company name, current title VP and sort by degrees away from me. If I find that there is someone I know who knows the person I write a brief email asking for an introduction. If the person is more than 2 degrees away than I sent LinkedIn introduction asking my contact to forward. Sounds right? But it is not.
Here is the problem. LinkedIn UI is cumbersome and clunky. It has a ton of options that I never use. It is implemented as a generic, hit all search that does not apply to any single use case. In fact, I can think of two major use cases: Looking for people with particular skills or, our use case, trying to find the contact in the company.
What I’d love to see is a search box with the prompt: What company are you looking to do business with?? When I type the company name in, I’d get the listing of contacts, immediately weighted by a few criteria. First, degrees away from me, closer should be higher. Secondly, ordered by titles. Yes, I know that titles are different and imprecise, but how many ways are there to spell VP?
And last but not least, I’d like to the person who I should ask to route the intro highlighted. The system should be smart enough to understand the strength of my tie as well as the frequency of using this person for introduction to make sure that I do not annoy them.
Now that would be amazing tool to have in place. I can only hope that if/once LinkedIn exposes its data using the Open Social API that someone would build a version of this.
Now having said all that, I have to acknowledge that LinkedIn is absolutely indispensable tool when it comes to business development. How else would you even know who to contact in a company that you looking to do business with? With LinkedIn, the problem becomes much easier - you search, get as close as you can and then get an introduction.
I just wished that LinkedIn did more with the wonderful data asset that they accumulated over all these year. Lets just hope that sometime soon they will.
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Linkedin is pretty cool as it’s very professional. It helps in growing your contacts which will benefit you on a professional level. On Linkedin people are there for purpose than for fun. Its seems you can’t contact people directly. To some extent its good. The best part with linkedin is that now i can access my Linkedin a/c thru my mobile, I’ve become an active user of it. Check this out: modazzle.com?channel=linkedin15
Indeed. I like the idea of searching for a company and getting weighted results. That would be super useful in your use case and a job hunting use case.