5 Responses

1. Christopher Penn, Financial Aid Podcast

   17|Dec|2006 1

   Ah, that depends on how many invites they’ve sent. LinkedIn permits you to upload your GMail contacts, and if you have a lot of people in your GMail contacts, personalizing each one could take a little while.

   On my first import I had 2,950 contacts…

   Christopher S. Penn, The Financial Aid Podcast
   A Publication of the Student Loan Network
   On-demand financial aid internet radio, no iPod required
   http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com
   http://www.StudentLoanNetwork.com

2. Doug Haslam

   18|Dec|2006 2

   I have read your blog post and found it extremely interesting. In order to participate fully in the online discussion, please post this comment….

   …seriously, I get the generic greeting all the time (for example, once from a Mr. Christopher Penn!). I probably have sent out a few benerics myself, knowing it’s probably not ideal. A quick search like you did, including the LinkedIn profile, is often enough to make a determination of whom you should add. I think you did the right thing by figuring out what the connection to this person was before accepting the invite.

3. Christopher Penn, Financial Aid Podcast

   18|Dec|2006 3

   Hey, there were a lot of contacts!

4. Bryan

   18|Dec|2006 4

   My thing is, I’d rather send 50 or 100 or 200 LinkedIn personalized invitations to people I really want to “connect” with, rather than a generic one to every single name in my Gmail (looks like I have a paltry 974).

   It’s going to mean a smaller number of connections to brag about at the next social-media meetup, but it will be a stronger and more personal network.

   Now I’m not suggesting that I’d never send two people the exact same invitation, because I’ve certainly done that. But let’s say I were sending out an invitation to 10 people I met at PodCamp. I’d wipe out the bland default message and write something like: “Good to meet you at PodCamp last week. I’d like to connect with you on LinkedIn.” Gets straight to the point and reminds the recipient how we met.

5. Christopher Penn, Financial Aid Podcast

   18|Dec|2006 5

   Oh, unquestionably if you have a known good source then by all means customize for that source, like dumping the PodCamp wiki or something. But if all you’ve got is a big address book and no clue where half of it originally came from, then something a little more generic might be all you have to go on.

   Definitely customize if you can. I’ve certainly done so with my podcast’s mailing list.