I have to say right off the bat that I'm not a big fan of LinkedIn. I've wondered for a while if I've been a bit unfair to LinkedIn and even have a video discussion coming soon (to be posted here on the blog shortly thereafter) with someone who's going to share some ways about how to make the most of LinkedIn. But in all honesty, I never use it and have often wondered if it's more trouble than its worth. If it didn't have such a good SEO benefit for me I might kill it off altogether.
For the most part I don't pay attention to LinkedIn, but there's a particularly annoying feature that doesn't seem to get discussed too much. The problem is that LinkedIn bills itself as a professional social networking tool that connects you to the professionals you want to know, but in my experience, it ends up allowing people you don't know well asking you to connect them to people you don't know at all. I've had this happen a couple times and just recently it happened again.
What's It Look Like
Here's how it plays out: someone who's connected with you on LinkedIn sees that one of your connections knows someone they want to know. So, Person A is someone you know. They want to know Person C, who is not someone you know, but Person C knows Person B, who is someone else you know. So there you are being asked to connect A to C via B and you have to decide if you want to be the one to make that connection and if it's worth the relational equity to spend with B to ask for furthering this connection to A. To me the whole thing seems like a good idea in theory but the reality of it isn't so pretty. One several occasions now it's turned out that I don't know what Person A's intentions are and I don't really know person B very well either, not to mention I have know idea the relationship between B and C.
I feel stuck between being the bad guy to Person A because I'm not being very helpful and taking advantage of person B, because my only interest in them is someone they know. I think there's a great opportunity for people to feel abused, spammed, or just down-right taken advantage of. I'd like to avoid all of these.
What You're Really Asking For
My suggestion for people using LinkedIn is to remember that just because you can see who your friends are connected to, and who their friends are connected to, doesn't mean that you need to start putting people on the spot. If you start pushing on those relationships for your own gain, the chances are you're asking people to spend a lot of relational equity that they might not want to spend. Instead, do the hard work of figuring out how to get to know the person you hope to meet in a more authentic way. Twitter's actually pretty darn good for that sort of thing and you don't put a few other people on the spot in the process.