LinkedIn – My Connection Addiction

Honestly, I never got Facebook. Sure, I created a page and Friended a bunch of real friends and then some other people who would only qualify as friends in a strange new virtual universe. Every time I touched on social networking in front of a group and casually mentioned that I had a Facebook page, a flood of new requests to connect would come in. For a fleeting moment the new widespread interest in being my friend seemed salve my childhood slights of being picked last for every team and not being invited to some key birthday parties (the “lost in the mail” fib instilled a misplaced early distrust of the postal system). But the growing list of my “friends” didn’t really make me feel more loved. So I maintained a tepid relationship with my Facebook account and the associated friends.

My main difficulty could be summed up in a single word, “Why?” Why would I really want to be connected with these people? And then I made the big leap of thinking that social networking itself held little value.

Then I found LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/). LinkedIn has been described as a grown-up Facebook. But I don’t think that is really fair. It isn’t about age or even maturity. It is matter of orientation. LinkedIn is about business, jobs, careers, and professional networking. No apps sending kisses. No beach pictures of people I really don’t want to see in bathing suits. Job titles, work experience, and references are the stuff of LinkedIn.

OK, it sounded a little boring to me too until a couple of weeks ago. That was when I created a UGA New Media Alumni Group (http://www.tinyurl.com/NMAlum). In just an hour, former students started joining. It was great to see what they had accomplished, where they were working, and who else they knew. Then the trouble started. In the middle of something important, I would get an alert that another alumni had joined the group. I would go on to send them a message catching up. I started searching for UGA grads. I began cajoling the group into ratting out other Alum so I could harass them to join. And I began to hear from the members about how the economic uncertainty is affecting even the new media. Then I loaded the LinkedIn app onto my iPhone. When my wife caught me building my network in bed, she told me I needed help. And when she mentioned an intervention to address my LinkedIn stalking, I knew I needed to change.

So I am learning cope. Cold turkey won’t work. But I only check my invitations 15 or 20 times a day. The UGA New Media Alumni group is over 100 strong now. And you wouldn’t believe all the cool places where our students work and all the wild things they have done. It really makes me proud. And all this networking is actually a lot more fun than actually working.