[Baypiggies] LinkedIn professional networking may be useful for BayPIGgies

[Michael Bernstein]

On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 11:36 -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> 
> I'm also not sure what benefit I get from it.

The primary use-case is that the user is trying to find someone to
establish a new business relationship with (ie. looking for an
employer/employee, hiring a professional in some capacity, partner for
new biz-venture, etc.), and the system facilitates finding such a person
through your existing connections and getting a chain-of-trust
introduction to them.

If you're:

- not looking for work (consulting or otherwise)

- not looking for employees

- not looking for *any* new business relationships (even to the extent
of wanting to find an accountant or interior decorator, say)

- and don't care to facilitate these introductions for other people
either

...then LinkedIn is fairly useless for you.

For me, LinkedIn has been reasonably useful. For example, I once needed
some advice on what warning signs to look for when contemplating doing
consulting work for a company in Russia. There was no way I would have
found someone with the relevant experience on my own even if I had been
willing to spam everyone in my contacts. LinkedIn made finding such a
person easy and facilitated a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend
introduction.

I got some good advice (for free, as it turns out), and after asking the
potential customer some pointed questions about the terms, avoided what
could have been a costly (mostly in terms of time) mistake.

In short, if making introductions or being introduced in a business
context is something you spend any time doing, LinkedIn will help you do
it more efficiently, which can lead to a qualitative difference in the
results you get.

- Michael Bernstein