Safety Consulting Corner

More on LinkedIn

If you have been using LinkedIn awhile, you might know many of the things it is good for but just in case, here are a few more ideas for you to consider. Click here to read a LinkedIn blog posting about ten of the ways you can use this social networking site.

You Can't Get Much Easier Than This

If you are like me, you are probably used to paying someone to create websites for you and depending on what you are looking for, you will be paying anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars. Freewebs is a website that does exactly what it's name says - provides free websites - with the added benefit of being really easy for regular people who aren't web designers. If it sounds too good to be true, you really need to check it out for yourself. Visit FreeWebs at www.freewebs.com and try it for yourself.

Lock In Your LinkedIn Contacts

I love LinkedIn. I use it all the time and I encourage other safety consultants to use it too. I have over 300 contacts in my LinkedIn account whom I actually know. LinkedIn gives you a great way to stay in touch with people regardless of how many times they change jobs or move houses. While I have written about LinkedIn before (click here) I want to talk about the security of those contacts that you have worked so hard to get but first I'd like to tell you about a personal experience. When you are on LinkedIn, you might see a link that encourages you to invite everyone in your AOL or Gmail or other address book to link to you on LinkedIn. I did this one time and while it did help me to reconnect with many old friends and acquaintances, it also got me temporarily locked out of LinkedIn all together. Why did this happen? Because a significant number of the people that received this invitation from me via LinkedIn's own program, responded that they didn't know me. If enough people report this (I think the threshold is 5) then LinkedIn locks you out. What I didn't realize was that LinkedIn sends the invite email to everyone in your address book and that may include everyone that you ever sent an email to or received one from and I will be the first to tell you that I don't know all of these people. While the batch invitation option that LinkedIn encourages is tempting, it can also be dangerous. I would suggest to most people that they stick with building their LinkedIn contact list one by one. On the other hand, if you are like me and are afraid of getting locked out again (I still have 200+ invitations outstanding) then I would suggest that you export your LinkedIn contacts to a secondary contact manager. I just discovered an easy way to do this. (Click Here).
Although this will not solve all of my problems if it happens again, I have a little more comfort knowing that I do have most of my LinkedIn contact information somewhere else.

PS - If you want to link to me, click below.