How to use Linkedin.com

Linkedin is a very good resource to expand the network. You can search people with certain background or certain title as long as they are in your network. It is very easy to expand your network. You just invite people with “LION” (Linked-In Open Networker) on their title. They are happy to connect with you. For example, “Allen (Ting-Lun) Lin” would love to receive connect request from you. Hahaha. Once they accept your invitation, you can expand your search to these LION’s friends. Therefore, you can easily reach people with specific criteria. (Be careful! Don’t input LION on keywords field and start to add people without checking. In this way, you may invite those who work for a company named LION and not happy to be contacted by strangers.)

However, there were two restrictions using this site:
1. You can only connect with someone you already know. (Site policy to avoid annoyance from people you don’t know)
If you wanna reach unknown people, you can ask one of your connections to introduce you to his/her friend. Or, you can pay Linkedin to send out short message to introduce yourself. But even you pay, the number of short message you can sent is really limited.
If you indicate someone as your friend when you invite he/she to your network, you can pass the system without entering his/her email address. However, there is a big risk here! If there are couple people don’t accept your invitation and report the system that they don’t know you, your account will be warned for the first time. If there are more people indicate that they don’t know you, your account will be canceled and all the network effort you spent before are gone.

2. You need to enter a person’s NAME on the name field, instead of a company name.
Someone might think use company name as the last name and some description as first name. In this way, it is like build up a company account on Linkedin. I see some people do that, but my advice is Don’t Do That! The website policy doesn’t allow this happen. So, if you get caught, your account will be canceled. They will ask you to transfer to another “real” account. All you can do is to download your current connection contacts and saved it as an excel file. Again, your network effort on linkedin is gone now.

Conclusion:
For the long run, I think it worth building up. I suggest managing it as a personal account rather than a company account. Once you have more contacts on linkedin, you can see more profiles through your 1st and 2nd tier contacts. Even though you can’t contact people outside of your 1st tier connections, you can check their title and name. Most of the time, this information is powerful enough, if you know how to use it.