 LinkedIn is a community of immense talent that you can draw on to solve any challenge you have, any many that you can’t imagine yet. LinkedIn Answers is your window into LinkedIn’s vibrant discussions, which are categorized according to topic area. Although the “Answers” vernacular is idiosyncratic (? ask “questions” to use “Answers”?), the forum is excellent.
To use Answers effectively, you need to master two basic skills: how to write engaging questions and how to answer questions so you add the most value. Here we will tackle writing questions, so read on for our first installment of LinkedIn crowdsourcing.
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Time-pressed executives must always think about what they are getting from their work as well as what a proposed situation (job, board of directorship, volunteer position) will cost in terms of time, energy and aggravation. All jobs are increasingly collaborative, so when you understand how to use LinkedIn for due diligence, you will go farther and endure less aggravation at the hands of future colleagues.
LinkedIn is an excellent reference checking tool, so here I will give you the quick run-down and refer you to a hilarious-for-some post by Guy Kawasaki for additional detail.
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LinkedIn and other social networks are often hard for executives to get their mental arms around—precisely because business and government have had linear structures, which function very differently than network structures. Reflect on many of the metaphors and concepts on which we depend: supply chains, production lines, value chains, hierarchies: even the notion of a process is usually linear. Our habit of thinking linearly makes networks difficult to deal with, conceptually and practically.
However, society is morphing from linear to networked patterns in almost all dimensions, and, although LinkedIn and other social networks reduce transaction costs, they don’t save us from having to deal with networks. It’s also interesting that the world, say, biological systems, exhibits networked patterns, and humans’ communication and business patterns are just starting to get in synch with that. If we want to be more effective and secure in this environment, the question of the moment is, “How do we make networks work for us?”
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LinkedIn tries to curb the natural human competitive instinct by capping the number of contacts displayed at 500, so people who like to achieve high numbers had to create their own sites. Many people wonder how it’s possible to manage large networks, so here I will address that briefly.
The organizing principle that drives activity in LinkedIn or other networks is, “What’s the point, what am I trying to accomplish?” Without some kind of intention, large numbers of contacts are essentially data and nothing more. They could be evolved to higher value relationships, but that takes work, and no one has the kind of time to deal with such a huge network.
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