Week 4, What Happened to me on LinkedIn

Okay, here are some results after one month of my LinkedIn membership for your attention.

Connections: a dozen of direct connections. I was not really active in acquiring them; what I did from the very beginning of my membership was the following:

-I sent invitations to connect on LinkedIn to members who studied at the same university during the five years I did (it's easy to search for your schoolmates at LinkedIn); some got connected, some replied with nostalgia messages but didn't connect, some didn't reply, one replied with a nasty message: "I don't know this person". On LinkedIn you have 3,000 invitations to send out for free, seems a lot for the beginning, but if you get 5 "I don't know this person" messages, the LinkedIn admin will block your membership and you are out. This way LinkedIn fights spamming, so you'd better behave ;-)

-I sent invitations to some friends who were not members but could be interested to join LinkedIn as I thought. Some joined and automatically became my connections, some ignored... Well, it's life, people are busy and overwhelmed with their own stuff...

Also I got connected with some LinkedIn members who contacted me through Questions/Answers.

Now here is the fun part: my second degree connections (they are connections of my direct, first degree connections) are 7,000+ and my third degree connections (they are connections of my second degree connections) are 1,000,000+! So, I got connected with more than one million professionals around the world in a month!

Recommendations: I recommended one person and was recommended by another one.

Expert: yes, I became an Expert of the Questions/Answers section of LinkedIn. I started answering other members questions posted publicly, right from the beginning. It gives me a satisfaction of helping people and also brings new connections and shows my expertise to the community - LinkedIn is all about networking after all! ;-)

When a member asks a question and receives answers, he can rate some answers as "good" and "best". When a person who answered, gets his/her first "best", the LinkedIn automatically puts the person into Experts directory and shows the number of questions this expert answered "this week" and "all time", and also the field of expertise of this expert.

Now I am listed as an Expert under just two sections "Exporting and Importing" and "Internationalization and Localization", both are pretty close to what I am able to do and looking for in terms of new consulting projects: Internet Marketing, Internet Research and English - Russian Translations.

Inquiries about my expertise: yes, I got a couple of inquiries, nothing can be finalized at this time, but the talks are encouraging.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/olgakellen