For those who read my previous tome on the Pepsi rebrand, you will notice that I am not without observations. A recurring one of those comes from LinkedIn Invites, the cornerstone of one's network and the sites viral spread. If it happens to me with the frequency with which it does (20%), I'm sure it happens to others. In this case, it's understand the LinkedIn invite process.
When inviting someone, the interface looks like this:
Wisely, LinkedIn wants the connections to count. Having a bunch of people connected who don't each other, for example, makes for a useless network and as a result an used site. Categorizing people also helps those receiving requests to better process and evaluate that request. Categorization is another good idea as a high percentage of connections that the sites more valuable users receive don't necessarily spark instant name recognition. The culture of LinkedIn though has many of these users accepting connections even if they value of that inbound request does more for the other person than the person accepting the connection. What's the issue? The categories, specifically, the first, "Colleague."
The word colleague has multiple meaning, and for a large number of people, it simply means that they work in the same industry. I'm sure that I've said when asking how I know someone that we we are colleagues, but in LinkedIn parlance, colleague has a specific meaning, and it's not working in a shared space. It's literally having worked in a shared space, i.e. a co-worker, past or present. And when selected by the requester, LinkedIn goes on the assumption that you two have worked together. And, when you haven't, it produces a suboptimal experience for the person receiving the request and leads to less accurate data being stored. Here's an example of what happens. You will receive a request like this (Thanks, Steve for being a good sport):
Unlike Facebook, though, LinkedIn has a rigid structure that doesn't allow you to classify the person as you see fit or modify the request once sent. So, in these industry colleague vs coworker mix-up situations like the one above, you could always ask the person to resend, but that's even worse than a guy blogging about the problem so people don't do that. Which, when clicking "Accept" leads to the following:
When this happens enough, LinkedIn shows this type of thank you page instead:
I'd certainly prefer a more flexible system, but given LinkedIn's ties into our professional lives, we might as well use it as efficiently as possible in order to get the most out of it, i.e. not look like we don't know what we're doing.
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