Thank you for sharing, Ann. I obviously need to cross the Mets off the list of teams, I'm trying out for this year...

It would be interesting for someone to do a call out on creative/good invites and showcase them. I believe it would encourage better writing (we know we get enough complaints/what not to do) and be a positive force.

Cheers from TiVo

Hey—wait a minute! I got the same exact invite.

*Sigh. And I thought I was "special"

That's exactly it, William... I wish more people put more thought into this stuff. Make it stand out. Make it fun to read. Have fun. Be different. LinkedIn should sponsor a contest... how fun would that be?

David -- LOL... Have no doubt you are special. You da man....

Nice piece.

Call me unsophisticated, but whatdoes LinkedIn do for you? I'm part of the network, and receive LinkedIn invites all the time. But what does it really do for you? Has it made a significant difference in your business? What aren't I seeing?

Signed,

Just Asking in California

Thanks for sharing! I'll be using his request as a template, including minor modifications, for my future invitations on LinkedIn and XING. Who can resist me then?

Sure beats the heck out of the standard templates you get.

Adrianne

I'm also linked in...
but I haven'r really made
it work for me yet. So I'm
curious for an answer to
Just Asking's question ;)

I'm with Roger in California -- is it really effective? I get invites and ignore, am I missing the boat?

Hi Roger,

My 2 cents ...

As a marketing recruiter I think Linked-In rocks. Since most Linked-In users use their personal email addresses for their Linked-In accounts, you are almost certain to cut through the clutter whenever you send an InMail. At least that has been my experience ... although "list fatigue" is getting to be a problem with Linked-In. ("List fatigue" is a direct mail / email marketing term which refers to a contact being over-mailed and becoming annoyed with the list and unsubscribing or blacklisting the sender.)

Having said that, Linked-In does two things for me:

1.) It credibalizes me to have a high-quality network. People contact me all the time to join their network, and I usually accept ~10% of the time. We are all known by the company we keep, and the "Harry Joiner" brand is all about high quality. I want to be the Mercedes Benz of marketing headhunters, which means that I can't link to Yugo-level executives without it dumbing down my brand. I know that makes me sound like a total asshole. But the way Linked-In works is that when people who don't know me click on my name, there's a field to the right which tells the user who we know in common. I want to know the person only through the very best people in their industry -- which puts a "halo effect" around my bio. On Linked-In, quality trumps quantity.

2.) It enables hiring managers to find me, and it enables me to find candidates. "Many a live wire would be a dead one were it not for his connections." Linked-In will extend your reach. That may seem like a curse when too many Yugo-caliber people reach out to you now. But someday you might need to use Linked-In to market yourself to the Mercedes set, and Linked-In can be a powerful tool for that if judiciously used.

Harry Joiner
MarketingHeadhunter.com

I too really like Linked in. People move around a lot and email addresses change. With Linked in it is easy to keep track of contacts (even if I did not know they moved on.)

Thanks to you and the great invite example, my next invite will definatly be more interesting.

Jo Masterson

I don't leverage LinkedIn to nearly the degree Harry does... but like Jo, it does allow me to keep up to date with friends and colleagues who change positions or switch companies. Just today, I learned that my friend Dana has a new job -- which is useful to know, since I needed to chat with him.

I also like to know who knows who.... so that I can be introduced to someone I'd like to contact. It's a rich, user-friendly database.

Too funny.A coworker put me in touch with charlie this week and he enticed me to meet over lunch by emailing me a picture of bald headed internet guys. How could I say no.

But ann-how come we're not connected on linked in???

Damn. Why are all the coolest marketers bald and male? I feel profoundly disadvantaged...

I'm late to this post (came here from Execunet's blog) but have always been interested in the template invitation subject.

I wrote a post a few weeks back on how I don't really care how I'm invited, and since then have gotten a number of invites using the template :p I guess I should have chosen my position a little better.

Also, I linked to a blog post by Scott Allen about alternatives to the templates, including invitations from a valley girl, hanz and franz, an SMS person (that's text messaging),... and more.

http://www.jibberjobber.com/blog/archives/405