Everybody is familiar with Facebook, the personal networking site that can help you find friends and possibly more.  Facebook has been quasi-used as a way to network business contacts, but it has been mostly thought of as a personals site.  Now, LinkedIn has created a solid business networking site where professionals can meet others to drum up business, jobs, contacts, and opportunities. 

A couple of our folks, including yours truly, has signed up for LinkedIn and are impressed.  First of all, it’s free to sign up.  And right away, you can invite other friends and colleagues, and it’s very easy to look up college alums, old company colleagues, or region-specific areas.  This site has an added feature for hiring candidates and looking for jobs.

How does it work?  You may invite someone as your contact, or as LinkedIn calls it, your connection.  Then, you’ll have access to your connections’ connections.  You’re allotted 5 introductions, meaning you can directly contact people through who you know, or through 2nd and 3rd degrees of separation.  If you want to contact a connection through a connection, your direct connection will need to decide if he approves such third-party connections.  I know you’re probably thinking of Kevin Bacon’s 6 degrees of separation right now, and yes maybe you will know somebody who knows him through this site.  But, it really is easy to work with after you set up your profile.

You may receive more introductions through upgrades and a paid subscription at the business level.  You may import your own contacts and be able to start chatting right away with these folks.

The added feature on this site is being able to join associations that are tailored towards your specialty: executives, consultants, female professionals, non-for-profit execs, and so on.  This allows for you to get right to it in terms of connecting to people right in your industry.  So, you can target folks in the IT industry who specialize in computer repairs within NYC. 

Another nice feature is being able to set up LinkedIn on your blackberry or iPhone.  Since your list of contacts might be too large to import/export into Outlook, having your LinkedIn contacts directly on your phone could come in handy with the LinkedIn mobile feature.  Overall, we like the site and give it a double thumbs up!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Recommended Sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.