Nov. 7, 2008
I was interviewed by a writer from the Star Tribune today about the value of LinkedIn. It really got me thinking about the service and why I have stuck with it, and why i hope those who have been recently laid off get re-hired.
I have been a major LinkedIn networker since 2004. The CTO of R/GA John Mayo-Smith invited me in when Target was in the midst of selling off Mervyns and Marshall Fields.
We had zeroed in on R/GA as a strategic interactive partner for the future transformation of Target.com. Bob Greenberg, the R and G of R/GA is a mad genius the like I hadn’t come across until I met John Olson. R/GA was where Kyle Cooper had started prior to moving on to Imaginary Forces and Prologue Films. I know this is an interesting side note, but another has to do with the movie Minority Report, you’ll have to ask me personally about that one though. Bob was also a collector of outsider art, my favorites being several Henry Darger pieces that hung on the walls of their Manhattan offices. Of course I was blown away by this since I had last seen the Darger work at the Contemporary in Chicago. It was an interesting project to say the least.
But I digress, LinkedIn.
I was hesitant at first since I had seen sixdegrees disappear, Friendster flounder and be replaced by MySpace, which in turn has been superceded by Facebook etc… but LinkedIn has thrived, despite the recent layoff news, against all of this competition, and other folks, Plaxo (the virus), Spock (the spy) and a host of other competitors.
I have used LinkedIn to connect people, to find employees, to find work, and to make connections that would never have been possible without the tool. I have a budding business partnership growing because we had so many interconnections on LinkedIn we decided we must get together to meet each other. I have twice as many folks on my LinkedIn network as I have on Facebook, it allows me to connect to every major company in the U.S. and the world.
LinkedIn has become an important part of my professional life, and I contend that it is one of the most successful social networking sites online today and will continue to be so.
