Professionals get linked in with Web site

Professionals get linked in with Web site

By Tammy Joyner
Cox News Service

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Imagine being invited to an A-list business cocktail party.

Most of the top brass of America's Fortune 500 companies are there. Sen. John Kerry makes an appearance. British rocker James Blunt drops in to solicit support for a charity and gets $10,000. You run into many of the film world's writers and producers, plus former presidential speechwriters.

And guys such as Atlanta businessman Scott LaFata. He's a regular at these gatherings. The connections he's made have helped him find employees, start a new business venture and reunite with an old Dun & Bradstreet colleague.

"We'd lost touch through the years," said LaFata.

Welcome to LinkedIn, where the powerful and well-connected —- and those who want to be connected —- gather online.

Think of it as a twist on the six-degrees-of-separation theory. Better yet, it's a Rolodex with 9 million contacts.

LinkedIn is part of the have-it-your-way Internet phenomenon that's taking over popular culture and the workplace. It has become so pervasive that Time magazine christened it its "Person of the Year" in 2006. The magazine cited LinkedIn, along with YouTube, MySpace, Google and scores of other sites as the new world of the Web.

"We're basically witnessing a new industry being formed," said Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, a Harvard Business School assistant professor of business administration specializing in strategy.

Teenagers have social networking sites. Employment boards abound for the job seeker.

But a Web site for the business purist?

That's what Konstantin Guericke, a founder of the Web site, and four other business associates set out to do four years ago. One of the founders, Reid Hoffman, now LinkedIn's chief executive, is a former executive at PayPal.

"They were just looking at the inefficiencies in the business world," said Kay Luo, a spokeswoman for Palo Alto, Calif.-based LinkedIn. "They noticed that the most successful business deals and hires came through relationships. So they figured there must be a way to make that process of managing your relationships easier."

It's free to join the site, and you have the option of paying a monthly fee for access to more features. You log onto the site, then fill in some information about yourself, such as where and when you went to college and places you've worked.

Registered users keep lists of connections —- people they know and trust in business. The list becomes part of a network of other contacts that can be used to find jobs or old schoolmates and widen your contacts in your field.

Each person's network includes their direct connections, as well as those connections' contacts (second-degree connections) and the connections of second-degree connections (third-degree connections). Sort of the Internet's friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend list.

Skeptics disproved

The first of the year is the busiest period on the Web site as people look to change jobs or careers and just make changes in their lives, Luo said.

"More and more people realize that in order to facilitate their careers, they really have to show up on LinkedIn. If the person doesn't have a LinkedIn profile, that's (considered) very strange," said Piskorski, who has one of his own.

Not bad for a little company that six years ago wasn't supposed to make it, let alone be part of a sweeping trend.

"There was a time when people believed LinkedIn wasn't going to survive," said Piskorski, who has been tracking what he calls the "social industry" since its inception and has met LinkedIn's co-founders. "The restrictions they put on members was so draconian. Everybody thought everybody else had the right idea."

If you're on LinkedIn, you can only connect with someone if both sides agree, and no one can see your personal profile or your network of connections unless they're a certain degree of separation. The concept seems to work for LinkedIn and its members, Piskorski said.

"They basically figured out a system of how to improve something without destroying the real networking," Piskorski said.

Rigid profile format

The site is also big for what it is not. It is not about you and likes and dislikes; it's about what you've achieved. You won't find pictures of people and their friends here.