For really the first time ever, I am using LinkedIn to help me find business contacts. I'm in the midst of doing some product research.
It's an interesting experience. If you are a friend of mine and you have a large list of contacts within LinkedIn, it is highly likely that I will be bugging you in the near future.
I have noticed a few things about LinkedIn during this process.
- First, I have almost no incentive to directly use LinkedIn's email introduction tools. The problem is that they are totally impersonal. Instead, I search for people ordered by degrees of separation. I only try to contact the people who are two degrees away from me. I find out how can introduce me to the business contact that I am interested in, and I email that person directly.
"On LinkedIn you have James Brown listed as a contact. I was wondering if you might be able to introduce me to him. I would like to...."
- Second, LinkedIn does not make it easy for me to conduct this kind of search. They have no facility to search the database for people who are connected to me through a given individual and who match a given search criteria.
- Third, the LinkedIn InMail feature is crazy expensive. $200 / month to be able to directly "InMail" only 50 people per month.
- Fourth, because LinkedIn does not have an API, there are all sorts of obvious integrations that would make me more productive, but don't yet exist. Why isn't gmail hooked up with LinkedIn?
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