Sacred Cow Dung

Wow! great article! I am just beginning my LinkedIn adventure and am only just beginning to realise the full potential of this networking tool!

I know I have been accuse of being the "Darth Vader of LinkedIn" when in comes to connections but even LinkedIn recommends having at least 20 connections:

In LinkedIn's own words:

NOTE: Since, like in the real world, the size of your network on LinkedIn depends on the number and quality of connections you have, we recommend you have at least 20 connections to people you know and trust on LinkedIn. You can do the search above with fewer connections, but you’ll get fewer and less meaningful results. Click here to find your existing contacts on LinkedIn in less than two minutes.

Joe makes so many good points here that I am completely jealous I didn't
write his post ....
(BTW, if you haven't been to Joe's blog it's here http://www.spiderware.com/
... and it's so so so much better than http://www.sacredcowdung.com )

but, I guess I am uniquely qualified to address his following query

I'd be interested in hearing how many *real* requests Christian
Mayaud
forwards per month. He has 8 times as many connections as I have, so
he should get 120 requests to forward every month. That should take a
few hours a month, certainly not a huge investment of time considering
the current value of his potential reach. But if my theory is true,
he doesn't receive 120 requests to forward each month. Since he has
*only* 6823 (at least this minute) direct connections, he is only
directly connected to less than .3% of LinkedIn members. If he were
to get .3% of the requests, he would get 165 requests per month,
certainly a manageable amount.

I was kinda interested as well ... so I went to the outlook folders where my
various LinkedIn correspondence gets sorted to to check

Here's the raw data based on type of request

=======================================================================
The week ending ... | Request to Forward | LinkedIn Request | Connect on
LinkedIn | TOTAL
=======================================================================
5/20 | 70 | 37
| 17 | 124
5/13 | 97 | 24
| 23 | 144
5/6 | 80 | 17
| 23 | 120
4/29 | 61 | 26
| 16 | 103
=======================================================================
TOTAL | 308 | 104
| 79 | 491
=======================================================================
ave per day | 11 | 3.7
| 2.8 | 17.5

At first, it looks like Joe is wrong BUT ...

point 1 -- these numbers are inflated because of redundancy ( ie one request
to forward may generate an additional "reminder to forward" when I'm
travelling or over a long weekend, and often forwarding generates an
additional "done" response or "thanks" response ie 1 request becomes 2 and
sometimes 3 emails) (and I don't feel like sampling my emails to that level
of detail ... Joe. you are welcome to come over and count'm yourself)

point 2 -- as Joe also noted in his "Connections Envy Post", the composition
of my network is a bit different than most other "superconnectors" (or
"SPPs") ...

.... my 682 connections have 116,200 connections between them, an
average of over 170 each! That's insane! It should be much less than that. I
checked a page worth (57 to be exact) of Christian Mayaud's first level
connections and found that they have an average of 15 connections each, vs.
my 170. To me that means that his network has much greater diversity and
uniqueness than mine, even on a "per connection" basis, and certainly in the
aggregate. He certainly deserves credit for evangelizing LinkedIn. I was
surprised to see how many people he is connected to who have him alone as
their single connection. That means he is walking the walk, not just talking
the talk!

The point is that I connect to alot more "low connectors" partly because I
accept alot of "newbies" and also "direct connects" (and, of course, after
you connect to a superconnector like myself, why would you EVER need any
more connections??? :-) )

Anway, I notice that "newbies" and "direct connects" are usually "on a
mission" (looking for a job, find a candidate, looking for capital, find a
certain type of contact within certain companies) and NOT just "fishing for
connections" ... this means I often end up processing 3 or 4 "requests to
forward" from them "right away" and then it stops ... so if you take away
the 200 or so new connects every month (ie I stop accepting new
connections), I think Joe is right -- my baseline or steady-state request
rate would be about 100 to 200 per month (which hasn't grown faster than the
overall growth rate of linkedin)

Also, only the "Requests to Forward" rate of 308 per mth takes anytime to
process (to write or "cut and paste" the forwarding message) ... the other
200 are really just notices and, at most, require just a simple yes or no
click. (you all know which one I click ... as "THE" LinkedIn SPP :-) )

My routine is to process requests 3-4x per week (every other day) for about
30 min or 1hr 1/2 per wk or about 6 hr per month so that 50 per hour or a
little over 1 min per request

So that's the "cost" side to me (I spend almost 1 hour per day processing my
regualr email sans LinkedIn so my productivity gains made by using the email
processing system I posted earlier more than make up for this incremental
time per month) ie 30 hours per month for email responses of which 6 are
Linkedin related ie 20% of the email I respond to is LinkedIn related.

The plus side is that most of the "direct connects" (ie I allow people to
"request to connect" to me directly) "come with a deal"!!!! ... This
intially surprised me ... I actually get more relevant referrals each week
from my "new direct connects" than I do "from my network" ... I have noted
for a long time that the deal flow from my large number of connections
hasn't increased much since about 1000 connections BUT what surprised me was
that allowing people to "request to connect directly" not only didn't cause
any problems but actually brings me more deal flow for me ... so as long as
I keep accepting "direct connections" at the rate I do, I effectively double
the amount of value I get from LinkedIn ...

although this surprized me intitially, it kinda makes sense -- why would
anyone search and find me, read all the way to the bottom, push the button
to connect ... to me, only then discover that they can either refer through
others or to me directly --- which would you chose? (I know the "LinkedIn
Party Line" is to chose the referral path so that your "trusted connections"
will "recommend you" to increase the likelihood that I'll respond ... but
> ... I think most people
go the way of least resistance ...but I could be wrong ...)

so, what I can't say is what would happen if I didn't allow "direct requests
to connect" ... at first you would think useful referrals to me would go
down by half but we also know that some percentage would still try to reach
me through the referral path -- so perhaps the effective refer-through rate
would actually go up to compensate a bit ...

just don't know ... but I also suspect that by allowing "direct
connections", LinkedIn allows your profile to be seen by those who have no
referral path to you ... which, as Joe noted, is quite significant (at least
20% of linkedin aren't reach by "superconnectors", if I'm not mistaken)

So there you have it, my STATs for last month ... and I think it support's
Joe's Thesis quite well ...

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