LinkedIn Friend Request Option Stinks
December 24, 2013
We are about to make a heretical observation based on Kirill Zubovsky’s blog post entitled, “How LinkedIn Screwed Up Our Friendship.” According to the article, Zubovsky uses LinkedIn like any professional seeking to maintain and forge business relationships. Recently he noticed that he was being sent a bunch of blind friend requests from people have never met before. Any sort of message identifying the user did not accompany the requests and he chalked it up to the user being lazy. Then he realized why he wasn’t receiving messages to accompany friend requests:
“I fell into the trap when I tried to invite Ethan Anderson to connect. I was just browsing through a page, which suggests people I may know, and I realized that indeed, I met Ethan at a 500Startups event a couple of months ago. I’ve been a fan ever since he did RedBeacon, and I find him to be quite a smart dude, so connecting on LinkedIn to keep him on a closer radar seemed like a natural step.”
He hit a connect button and viola! A friend request was sent without allowing Zubovsky to personalize it. He puts it that LinkedIn messed up his friendship with this potential business contact. We agree with him that LinkedIn should improve this “connect” option. No one likes getting requests from strangers and business relationships rely on an introduction to take root.
Whitney Grace, December 24, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Comments
One Response to “LinkedIn Friend Request Option Stinks”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
One way they could improve it would be to explicitly state that the user clicked on the “you may know” link and why that user was prompted to add you:
“I would like to add you to my professional network because Linked In recommended you based on the fact that we both [know a lot of people at IBM]”
Even better, pre-fill a dialog with that message and let the users augment. And make it an option in settings.
If only there were a more appropriate place to post this suggestion.