Recently I posted LinkedIn (part 1) about my efforts to better understand and use it as a networking platform. It ended up generating a lot of good comments, always nice to see, and I'll be addressing some of those here and/or in part 3 coming up in a week or so.

My goal was to grow my measured network from 60 to 250 by the end of the year. It seemed like the best place to start was my Outlook contact list, so I installed an ActiveX control (living large) from LinkedIn that would pull out all the contacts and give me the option to send them an invitation. I had about 200 contacts, and some of those were old (need to clean up sometime, a good reminder to set) and others just didn't seem to be a good fit, so I sent out perhaps 100-125 invitations. If you didn't opt to go through and manually check/uncheck this one step would take perhaps 10 minutes tops.

Almost immediately a good portion of the invitations were accepted, so I moved to step 2 - doing a quick run through of connections listed for my connections looking for people that I "knew" but hadn't added to my list yet. This turned out to be a great technique and within an hour I identified close to 50 more contacts that I wanted to invite. Just to clear, I wasn't mining those other contact lists for people I wanted to meet, this was just to help me find people I already knew. It definitely pointed out that I wasn't doing a very good job getting my contacts into Outlook.

Step 3 was to start thinking about all the groups I participate in, and my groups it could be a former employer, a well known group such as SQL MVP's, or more informal groups such as former students, members of the local SQL user group, user group leaders in Florida etc. If you make that list and just mentally run down who you can think of from each group you'll probably find more contacts - again, not new ones, these are people you know.  This also led me to pay more attention to the LinkedIn groups. I had already joined the SSC group so I could see how it was doing, and also the PASS group. They were good places to look for contacts, and I wanted to experiment, so I started a new LinkedIn group for members of my local SQL group and sent out an email to the mailing list. We're up to about 50 members so far, and here again I found a few people that I knew but had not yet added to my list.

I gained some more from my blog readers, and a few more from the blog entry being featured in the SSC newsletter. Most of these were new contacts, but a few were people that I "knew" and had not listed yet. I started at about 60 contacts, as of Mar 29 I'm up to 195 contacts with 55 invitations still open. So I've made good progress towards my goal, reconnected with quite a few people,  and learned a few things along the way.

Coming up soon I'll be looking at strategies particular to LinkedIn, but also going back to my evolving philosophy on networking. At the end I want to have a sustainable strategy that works for me, but I also hope to be able to write down some options for networking that work for those of us in technology who want to have a network, but don't want to spend a ton of time 'networking for the sake of networking'.

Already on LinkedIn? A valid way to "know me" is to be a regular reader of my blog. If you're interested, join my network!