Thanks for sharing your experience, John. I often wonder whether the professional using the template realizes that the receiver may start wondering how they have come to be a person of trust when they don’t know each other. 🙂

Thanks for sharing your insights and experience, Debra. The key to successfully using LinkedIn lies in engagement and creating relationships, not collecting virtual business cards. 🙂

I make it a point to visit all generic boiler invite profiles and as you pointed out, request more information. That is how example number 3 and I finally connected in the spirit of LinkedIn. In the cases where I do finally accept an invite, I usually write to thank them for reaching out to connect with me and offer the suggestion to personalize their invites for future engagement with others. So far, each one has written back in appreciation of my suggestion. Now that is conversation!

I also encourage people to not ignore invitations they receive, but to first visit the other person’s profile and if it appears to be someone you might want to connect with to then hit “Reply but don’t accept.” Sent the other person a request asking how they found you. If that person doesn’t reply then you can probably rest assured that they weren’t all that interesting in starting a conversation and building a relationship.
Thanks for sharing.
🙂
D

Welcome back, Sally. There seems to be an increase in such invites recently and it was my communication with the lady in the last example that reminded me that the other person may not be realizing the impact of the ‘trusting’ invite on the receiver. It is a good idea to ask how the other person knows you before accepting but the best action is to personalize the invitation to start with.

Welcome to The Karmic Ally Coaching Experience Blog, Kebba. I’m glad you found the post useful. About being a LION, it all comes down to what your objective was when you listed yourself as a LION.

If the intention or objective was to grow your business, whether locally or globally, promote yourself via your status updates or to find people/prospects or business opportunities, then the decision to become a LION was a good one since you have made yourself available to more opportunity not to mention better search engine ranking and amplification of status updates and messages.

On the other hand, this also dilutes your network making it harder to comb through people you know in your list of connections. You might consider tagging your connections to make the filtering easier.

Simply connecting will not achieve one’s objectives and one has to engage meaningfully an aspect that I cover in my LinkedIn product for professionals.

Even as a LION, you retain control over who you wish to connect with. Remember you aren’t necessarily connecting with the person as much as you are connecting with their network and if their network is beneficial to you, you may wish to keep the person in your network.

If the request appears dubious or, as Graham Segal pointed out ‘iffy’, you are not obliged to accept that invitation. Connecting with someone on LinkedIn isn’t an endorsement of their character although in the case of non-LIONS who have an active off-line network; it may be misconstrued by others as a signal that you trust the person.

Hope that helps! 🙂

I love your last example. Even though you didn’t know the person it sounds like you both used LinkedIn the way it’s meant to work. To connect with people in your network (and potentially to help each other out).

Thanks for sharing!

Sally

Looks like you have received quite a few of these vague invitations to connect on LinkedIn, Graham! Coming from an audit background myself, I tend to be cautious while connecting as well. The venture capital market is very different and your requirement to keep your connections ‘clean’ is very important. I’m curious though, do any of these ‘iffy’ connection requests ever respond back or do they disappear back into the black hole? 🙂