Your LinkedIn Profile: Keep It Professional

I always kept my LinkedIn profile strictly professional. It has always been reserved only for people I either had worked with in the past, or people I crossed paths in the Industry I belong.
I really liked the feature that you have to select the position and/or the company from the drop-down box, or have to actually add the job to your "LinkedIn Resume", and it's like a whole new story. I have a little over 100 contacts and never raced to become 500+ superstar. The 500 past and current colleagues? Gee, you're either a hell of a job hopper or had worked for huge corporations and added everyone from the executive team to the tech support people.

Some people even post their email address to the profile, since an email address is required to be added to your network. Also I often come across the message on personal blogs "I believe in networking power, connect with me on LinkedIn, my email address is xyz@comapny.com!"
Interesting enough, I came accross the List of Social Computing Strategists at Enterprise Corporations.
As you can see the majority of these Industry leaders have less than 300 LinkedIn contacts in their networks. And I am sure they receive dozens of connection requests daily and they know WAY many more people in their respective industries, and they do have MANY friends, but they chose to be selective and only add those they had a professional ties with.
To me LinkedIn profile were more like an addition to your resume and employment verification at the same time. I still get amused when HR department requires people fill out these obsolete employment applications with a last 3 places you worked and 3 references. Just look at my LinkedIn profile and please spare me from all these useless paperwork!
To my surprise LinkedIn claimed 47% of the UK's web users are mixing their social and professional lives by accepting networking invitations from "frolleagues" - basically from your friends or from the people you really had zero professional interaction, just know them socially outside the work.
It was nice to find out that the majority of LinkedIn users (73%) feel the same way and they wanted to keep them separate. However, 36% of workers feel an obligation to accept friend request from colleagues, even though they don't really have any professional relationship with.
"It's becoming increasingly important that we keep our professional and social lives separate and manage our online reputation as effectively as possible," said a LinkedIn spokeswoman.
So I would only add people I worked with, for everything else is a Facebook.

LinkedIn: No Booze Mail Allowed

LinkedIn is known for being resilient to all web 2.0 temptations, so hearing “We have no interest in doing it like Facebook with an open A.P.I. letting people do whatever they want" from their CEO wasn't surprising at all. Also often being called "first professional social networking site,"LinkedIn denies even being a social network.
Well, I would agree at certain point, I treat my LinkedIn profile page just like my resume: keep it up to date but really don't check it out unless there's a reason to. It's a nice tool for professionals to keep in touch with colleagues and collect endorsements and references. My friends never contact me via LinkedIn and frankly I don't have anyone in my connection list who would know me outside of workplace.
Linkedin does have some social elements to it: "Answers", comments, introduction through network and the ability to add your photo. All the above are features let you add some colors to plain boring resume page.
During the seminar "Effectively Leveraging Social Networking" at SMX Conference I learned some interesting facts about LinkedIn:
Did you know that average income of LinkedIn user is $140,000?
Also I had no idea that LinkedIn pages don't have "no follow" tag so basically by asking the people in your company linking to the company's website you can really boost it's rankings.

Anyway, LinkedIn will probably stay the conservative, strictly professional website that will be Internet version of your CV, but it will be interesting to see the stats for this year. Last year LinkedIn had an astonishing growth rate of 164%