So, you been on LinkedIn since LinkedIn launched and all this time connecting to the Right people, but now you find many of the Right People are no longer the Right people. Is it time to say goodbye to old LinkedIn contacts who seemed to have lost their direction, changed their attitude towards everything or have given up on social networking? The answer for me is, Yes.
What Brought Me to This Question
Back in 1998 at the beginning of my second career my focus was to learn everything about what is now commonly known as digital marketing. The industry I associated with closely was Golf. More specifically, promoted the private country club where business golf is best played.
Then came 2008 when being a golfer, or was a member of a country club, was not advantageous to improving your revenue horizon. Naturally, the down turn in the economy forced me to go back to offering my expertise as an operations manager. LinkedIn became a larger player during this time.
In the Beginning
My interest in Golf and helping the golf industry rebrand it’s tarnished image remained the same. The change in direction I took towards providing my 32 years of operations management kept me close to Golf, but lead me also to seeing how digital marketing was evolving in the business world.
All along this dual path I journeyed down I was active on LinkedIn. Actually, since 1998 I had been on over 52 different online social networks which included the Alpha and Beta launches of Facebook, Twitter and Google+. However, LinkedIn was the one that has stood the test of time and has made the changes it needed to make to become my number 2 social network. Google+ has edged out LinkedIn for the time being since Google is the 900lb gorilla for digital marketing.
Don’t Play the Numbers Game
At one point I had over 3500 connections on LinkedIn. Yes, that gained me notoriety on LinkedIn, but mostly from the businesses who have placed Spamming into their marketing plan. Even with all of the aggravations my presence on LinkedIn was producing over 85% of my business. This was something I could not ignore.
In recent years I was given the opportunity to help two company’s merge into a very solid experience driven video centric digital marketing agency in Dallas, Texas. This resulted in me becoming the founder and director of operations for SyncLab Media.
Latest Change
Again, offering my operations experience resulted in me making another change on LinkedIn which leads to today’s issue of how best to use LinkedIn.
When I look at my connection list and the Groups I have developed on LinkedIn I see a lot of old friends, many of whom I know personally. However, over the years, a large number of people who I really do not know appear to really have nothing to offer anyone on any issue. Why I connected with them is unknown. It must of had something to do with what they showed they did professionally in their profile.
Nonetheless, I question why I would want to keep the people I connected with years ago who appear to have either lost their direction in using LinkedIn as a business social network or have fallen, like so many others do, to the advice of social media consultants who told them they needed to connect to thousands of people they do not know so as to appear they are an “Influencer”. In other words, there appear to be a large number of people who asked to connect to me because I showed I had a Large number of connections and they thought connecting to me would make them appear they are “someone”.
Decision
Then I have the people I connected with in the Golf Industry of which I cherish being connected to since I do from time to time play with the thought of rewriting my Book, How To Play Business Golf. I know these contacts would enjoy it since it offers them a tool that, if used correctly, would help them revitalize business people interest to start using golf as a business tool.
Unfortunately, during my resent review of my Golf Industry connections I have found many of them have gone off to other industries or have also drank the Koolaide of the dark side of the internet. I have never understood why so many of the golf professionals of the world either ignore the power of the internet or was given bad advise on how to incorporate old school marketing strategies in how they use social media.
All of this has resulted in me feeling it is time to say Goodbye to a large number of my LinkedIn connections. Over the next few weeks I will be going through my 1500 LinkedIn connections determining who I cut loose and who I keep in my posse.
One of the benefits of clearing out my connections who see posting .gifs or autoplay videos as providing quality content in the LinkedIn stream, will be that now I will be able to see the updates from the people I know.
Having a more productive and relevant connection list will also allow me to see interact with more people.
Sorry if you are one of the ones I cut. Maybe if you send me a note on why I should keep you as a connection would help.
If you are one of the hundreds of my connections I know, I really look forward to reading your frequent updates.
Let me know how I can help.
