What is Your LinkedIn Attitude?

Has anyone felt as if they got kicked in the teeth after reaching out to someone here on LinkedIn? I think am sure that I have responded in ways that made someone feel that way and I am sorry about that. I am not sorry because it happened to me, I am probably sorry because I did it to someone else AFTER it happened to me multiple times. It causes me to wonder just why some people are even here and that, if they aren't here to move something forward in their lives, they can go back to FB. Every pitch we receive here will not be the right one for our home-run swing (to bring a sports metaphor into it), but a home run hitter has to see all of the pitches many times over to determine which one to knock over the fence. If you never see it, stands to reason you get caught looking and strike out. Which way do you want to have it? For me, I am looking at every pitch and am throwing my signature pitches until someone takes a cut. I'll be here until.

Every now I then I feel like this letter below is the one I want to send. I keep it on my desktop but never send it. It does the most good if I just read it to myself, have a glass of red, watch a cool movie then get back in the hunt for success. That 's the way it works. Success requires activity and you will have to swing at some bad pitches before hitting the right one. I am looking for people who want to take big swings with no risk. Hard to find these days but there are millions out here and I only want five.

Dear LinkedIn colleague,

I just read your profile and a few things caught my attention. You say you are seeking and open to new opportunities. I thought that was great and so I looked further into your profile to see if maybe I can find a hint as to what you might be interested it. I hope you can understand and relate to that because most of the people out here seem to be interested in something and have built a profile here to engage other like-minded people. I see you are interested in networking and human rights issues. It also says you are interested in working to improve social justice and several other causes that I also find very important.

I found all of this information to be very inspiring and felt you would be a person I would love to connect with and to see what other interests we had in common and maybe if there is a project we would like to work together. Maybe you even know someone who is looking to team up with me or vice versa. I like the LinkedIn community because of the diversity of people and the global reach that is provides.

I like to believe that we are all here to connect, although I realize some people only build a profile because conventional wisdom sort of calls for it, but most people are not really active in this community. I hope that my reaching out to you does not present as an annoyance as I only wish to expand my network, learn from others and help wherever I can. I believe in solutions and in helping people reach solutions that benefit them as well as ones that compress the time it takes to achieve goals.

I want you to know that I do not reach out to you randomly and that I considered if there was some possibility of mutual support between our profiles and networks. What I did next was to check your willingness to connect as reflected in your profile under recommendation for contacting you and in the choices you listed in the InMail section. If it said you were interested in any of the following, I felt it would be ok to reach out to you for these reasons; job inquiries, expertise requests, business deals, reference requests, getting back in touch.

I will admit that I was surprised when I sent you an InMail to ask if you would consider sharing your expertise on employee benefits or your hiring strategy, that you returned my InMail and rated it as being inappropriate to LinkedIn. I took care in crafting a message that was short and one that complimented your profile and showed respect for your expertise. I have to ask what made you give me such a rating when I was only responding to the very things you stated interested you.

It's alright though, as there are 300 million LinkedIn members and many of them are happy to share their experience and knowledge. After all, what better way to become known as an industry expert? I do appreciate that you have time constraints, obligations and emails can be annoying. I suppose I thought it would be less inconveniencing than a cold phone call and annoying answering machine messages that are so irritating that you created a phone line just to catch such calls so they can be dumped without consideration.

As a business owner I certainly respect that thinking. I do wonder that, if in these automated times, we do not sometimes let opportunities pass us by that might have vaulted us to stardom in our industry.

Not to worry though, if I sent 40 such requests for advice, or to share an opportunity or to tell people they have several words in their profile that are spelled wrong or ambiguous, 35 of those InMails will be returned un-opened, two will be reported as inappropriate and three will actually respond.

I have learned to be thankful for the 3 people who responded because that is what separates great from greatness.

Thanks for your consideration and I wish you all the success in the world.

~Peter