Caribbean professionals not using LinkedIn?

December 13, 2007

by David Mullings

Social networking sites have been receiving tons of publicity recently, but that has been mainly reserved for MySpace, Facebook and similar sites. LinkedIn, a site focused squarely on the professional market and particularly useful for showing degrees of separation from people, has not received nearly as much buzz.

I have been a member of LinkedIn since early last year (I only joined Facebook in May 2007) and I wasn’t totally sure how useful it would be other than to connect with people I am doing business with or seek out introductions to their connections. I also noticed that very few professionals from the Caribbean were members.

LinkedIn recently unveiled their Answers section, similar to Yahoo Answers, and I decided to make use of it for the first time two days ago. I posted a question about advertising platforms and received 6 responses over the next 24 hours from a range of qualified sources. Free consultation is a major reason for me to go back and use the feature.

I also answered a question about small businesses successfully using the web to promote their companies. It turns out that the person who posed the question is based in London and is working on a book focusing on that topic to be published next year and he actually contacted me for an interview because he was so impressed with my stories. This is actually the second book interview I have landed in the last 3 months and both were because of social networking sites (the first one was through Facebook for a book on Gen Y Entrepreneurs being published by McGraw-Hill next year).

I would love to see more Caribbean professionals join LinkedIn and begin to leverage these tools to ask questions and provide advice in their area of expertise, thus raising the profile of business in the Caribbean. Through LinkedIn I have been able to connect with executives at MTV Networks and partners in Silicon Valley. Surely other entrepreneurs can make use of LinkedIn to benefit their business and raise their professional profile.

A LinkedIn profile is also good because it shows up in search engine results for your name and I believe that a person should seek to control their digital footprint. Some potential business partners or clients do run searches on people before a meeting, I certainly do, and being able to add one more credible source of information that you have complete control of can only be positive.

Feel free to add me as a connection - http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmullings

Comments

5 Responses to “Caribbean professionals not using LinkedIn?”

Stuart King on December 13th, 2007 7:35 pm

I was going to join LinkedIn a few months ago, but I didn’t because I couldn’t find out enough about the site without actually joining. They should take a page out of the guinep sellers book and offer people a free guinep before they ask them to buy the whole bunch.
Suzette Gardner on December 13th, 2007 10:14 pm

That’s a funny comment - LOL! LinkedIn is a pretty good professional networking site regardless. I hope you give it a shot if you are into building your professional contact dbase.
Suzette Gardner on December 13th, 2007 10:15 pm

and its free - until they start selling your information.
sandor on December 14th, 2007 7:04 pm

i’ve actually been meaning to join for a few months now. will join next week for sure.
Xavier on December 17th, 2007 3:00 pm

I think one of the biggest issues with Linkedin, facebook and similar sites are the ability to separate the people you know into groups (Friends, family etc). I don’t want my ex-coworkers to know my family or friends or business etc…I hear that groups will be the focus next year.