In August 2009 I wrote a posting entitled, LinkedIn:  growing my connections.  At the time I had 49 connections on LinkedIn.

I tend to be a bit of a slow starter when it comes to new technology and I’m still not sure when and why to LinkIn.  I’m delighted to be connected with people I’ve met along the way and with whom I’ve enjoyed working or playing.  Some people ask to connect whom I don’t know and I’m currently pursuing a policy of saying yes and seeing what this leads to.  Only last week, I asked someone who’d asked me to connect if he would kindly stop sending me generalised marketing e-mails via Linkedin to support me in managing my time.  He said yes – consider it done.  Had he said no, or ignored my e-mail and continued sending, I could have broken the link.

I’ve only broken the link once.  It was a link to someone who writes on a forum that I, too, have been writing on for a number of years.  He wrote something about me on the forum I didn’t enjoy and I invited him to dialogue around it.  He never responded.  Two other members of the forum also followed up by telling me all the things they most dislike about me and I took time with them – again, to invite dialogue with the aim of building a better mutual understanding.  I thought about his original posting and his absence of response when I followed up and asked myself, is this someone who is wanting to build a mutually rewarding relationship?  And was it working for me?  When I decided that, no, it wasn’t working for me, I knew it was time to sever the connection on LinkedIn and to let him know that I was up for connecting again – after reaching a better understanding.

Anyway, all this is leading to saying that when I wrote in 2009 I made a note to check how many connections I have a year down the line.  I’ve been a little slow to check the numbers, which today stand at 379.  I am more interested in the quality of those connections than I am in the numbers, so I continue to experiment and explore.