Top 2 Reasons LinkedIn Is Taking Over the World

I’m fascinated by LinkedIn, which now seems to me like a combination virtual headhunter and 21st-century international water cooler. Even though I’ve been on Linkedin for years, I started to notice it for real about 18 months ago, when our Director began finding her best job candidates on Linkedin.  Then I read an article about the importance of growing your network on LinkedIn, so I began inviting people to connect (and getting lots of invitations in return).

I’ve since been trying to figure out how best to use it, and I’m still trying to get my head around it.  The very best article I’ve found so far is an aggregation of other articles by the folks on a website called linkedintelligence.com, whose tagline is “Linked Intelligence is the unofficial source for all things LinkedIn™.”

In my travels, I’ve discovered that LinkedIn now has over 160 million members, all over the world, and that professionals are joining at an ongoing rate of 2 per second. That’s right, do the math – it comes out to around 170,000 every 24 hours.

It’s a perfectly timed phenomenon.  It combines two critical elements:

• The astonishing capability of social media to create a one-to-one personal connection with virtually anyone
• The demands on most businesses – even small businesses – to operate nationally and, yes, globally

Think about it in terms of job search and hiring, one of LinkedIn’s most popular uses.  Even in this era, almost 50% of people say they got their job through personal connections and networking.  LinkedIn allows for personal connection at a distance.  When you get someone’s resume on LinkedIn, you also get a lot of other information that you’d otherwise only get by meeting him or her – you can even see how many degrees of separation you are from that person.  It ‘feels’ personal.  And you can get those resumes from all over the world.

We recently needed to find an extremely skilled instructor and consultant who was completely bi-lingual, who had lived and worked in both North and South America, and who would be comfortable working as a contract consultant with us (at least initially) vs. coming on staff.  LinkedIn delivered us the right candidate, who is all we wanted and more – and who, I’m certain, we never would have found without LInkedIn.

Voila: Personal + global business.

The same is true in the area of sales and customer acquisition. We’ve all become used to having access to an incredible variety of goods and services; we expect it.  But we often still want to have a personal connection to the company offering us those goods and services – we want to deal with someone who we trust and who we believe understands our needs; the habit of thousands of years of making transactions with individuals doesn’t evaporate in a generation.  LinkedIn can offer that: a fairly 3-D connection with a business and the people who operate it and sell their wares to you…anywhere in the world.

Again: personal + global business.

I’m going to be even more fascinated to see where it goes from here: I get the feeling it’s going to get ever more useful as it evolves and as we all figure out collectively what it can be to us.

Stay tuned…