Many of my classmates have expressed skepticism about the potential for finding a job or otherwise furthering one’s career through LinkedIn. While I tend to share their skepticism, I feel that perhaps we are not the community for which LinkedIn is intended. So rather than analyze my own (minimal) use of the service, I decided to interview my father, who was in California last week for a speaking engagement. Coincidentally, he was hired to speak as a result of a connection made through his LinkedIn network.

First I asked my father about his LinkedIn profile. In his first month of using the service, he updated his profile three times. He told me that when he first filled it out, he had just a little info. Then he decided to go back and add some more marketing material from his web site to establish his identity as a speaker and consultant. He made his profile a little more personal and added more detail. He decided to make his profile open to be browsed by anyone, as he wasn’t concerned about privacy. The third time he updated his profile he added some updated information about his recent work and an affiliation with a local professional group. He had discussed the site with other members of the group and they had decided that it would be beneficial if all of them added the group to their profiles, so that if one member were discovered on the network, others in the group could be quickly navigated to. Finally he added some keywords and test results to his profile, including his Myers-Briggs personality type and Gallup Strengths Finder profile.

In addition to making his profile open, he chose to make his network public. He also encourages all of his connections to make their networks public to allow for the serendipitous discovery of mutual contacts. In fact, he would like to make his connections visible to anyone in his network (within four degrees), but even “public” profile connections are only visible to direct connections. He would also like more of the network at large to be visible. Often there is a particular person whom he would like to contact. If he were able to see the full chain of connections to that person, he might find someone he knows (but is not yet linked to) in the chain. But LinkedIn does not allow this sort of discovery, as it forces him to go through the first link on the chain to initiate a contact. Interestingly, my father usually doesn’t actually use LinkedIn much for contacting people: the site is used as a discovery tool, and he uses the phone or email to actually get in touch. This relieves him of having to rely on intermediaries for communication.

My father believes that LinkedIn is an effective tool for making business contacts, and his recent speaking engagement seems to support this. He pointed out that while he may have made those contacts without LinkedIn, he feels that the service certainly catalyzed the process and added some redundant connections to the decision-makers at the company that hired him, which ensured that he would get the business. He uses it mostly for creating new connections, but also recognizes its usefulness for maintaining his weak ties. He pointed out that it is somewhat redundant for strong connections–he doesn’t need a social networking service to maintain those.

My father has a large number of connections (217 at last count). I asked him whether he has trouble manageing that many weak ties. He told me that he scans through them about once a week or so, and can generally recall from memory who everyone is and how he met them. But occasionally he needs to remind himself by looking in his address book, contact manager, or email archives. He suggested that it would be useful to have LinkedIn unified with those other applications, allowing him to do this without having to switch modalities. I asked him if he would like to be able to rank his connections a la Orkut, and he said that it sounded intriguing, but that he would want some guidelines on how to use the rankings. If someone had a good system for organizing contacts that included classification guidelines, he would probably use it.

I asked my father how he evaluates strangers who make requests for contact through LinkedIn–how he decides whether or not to reply. He told me that first he looks at the person’s profile, scanning the entire page, checking their number of connections, who they work for (if they are employed at all), their position, and the size of their company. He also looks at endorsements, though he doesn’t feel that a lack of endorsements is negative. If he sees too many endoresements he tends to discount them on the theory that the person is probably an “endorsements collector.” Next he looks their company up on the web. He tries to evaluate if their desire for contact is due to a legitimate or useful business purpose. If he decides that it is, and that he can be helpful to them, he usually accepts the contact. He won’t reject a contact just because he doesn’t see anything in it for himself. On the other hand, he is conscious that making introductions to people in his network costs him social capital, and he is unlikely to use this capital introducing people he doesn’t know well to “expensive” contacts.

It was really interesting discussing the dynamics of social networking software with my dad. Although he has a very pragmatic view of LinkedIn, his observations dovetailed quite nicely with the academic perspective I’ve taken at school. In particular, his experiences finding new business supported Granovetter’s theory that weak ties are of primary importance for the diffusion of information, and he has an intuitive sense of how his transactions on LinkedIn increase or deplete his stock of social capital, in line with Putnam’s theories.

At any rate, my dad certainly seems to be getting into social software. While checking my dad’s site tonight in the process of writing this, I noticed that he is planning on launching a blog! Yikes…