Network(s)ing: LinkedIn and the Small (Business) World Phenomenon
https://www.linkedin.com/about-us?trk=uno-reg-guest-home-about
https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/110/your-network-and-degrees-of-connection?lang=en
http://biz.idahostatejournal.com/is-networking-most-important-business-skill-2/
LinkedIn is “the world’s largest professional network,” according to said website’s About page. It is a website that I’m sure most Cornellians are familiar with, because every college’s Career Center encourages its students to sign-up for one as early as possible. The logic is that the earlier you start, the more connections (as LinkedIn calls them) you will have when it is actually time to start seriously hunting for internships and jobs. (And I’m sure everyone who attempted to go to any one of the Career Fair Days this year is regretting not creating a LinkedIn the day they were born so they could just avoid that mess altogether).
And according to what we’ve been learning in class about bridges, it does indeed seem that the more connections you have on LinkedIn, the more chances you have to find that internship or job that you have been looking for. In the fourth link, which is an article arguing that networking is the most important business skill one can develop, the author talks about how his 947 personal connections actually connect him to 5,007,078(!) other professionals.
You may be thinking that 5,007,078(!) is a crazy number. I will agree that it is a truly staggering number. But according to LinkedIn in the second link, your personal connections gives you access to people that are two more degrees removed from you than you personal connections. In other words, you have access to three degrees of connections as soon as you connect to someone. What is a degree? An easy way to understand it is how many edges separate you and another person, or node.
So you yourself are 0 degrees from yourself (I hope). Your best friends, your mother, etc.–they would be one degree removed from yourself. Your mother’s best friend from high school that you haven’t personally met? Two degrees from you. Your mother’s high school best friend’s in-laws? Three degrees from you. These degrees are also explained in the second link in terms of professionals.
As far as I can tell, LinkedIn only allows you to find and connect with people who are within three degrees of yourself. So the claim that the author of the fourth article makes is that he is within three degrees of 5,007,078(!) people. As far as asking for an internship or job is concerned, within three degrees of yourself is not an outrageous idea. And having so many people in the network probably means that there will be at least one that is connected to the field you are interested in.
I do think that the benefits of having such a large connection pool can be diminished if all of the connections are too closely tied. As we learned in class, the real benefits of having so many acquaintances and friends-of-friends come from the fact that people operating in a different social spheres have access to different pools of information. If the LinkedIn group is too connected to each other, they all have the same information and there is no way to leverage connections to get access to different information. My personal opinion is that the author of the fourth article doesn’t have much to worry about with such a large pool of connections, but for people less well connected, they should focus their networking and info sharing on local bridges. A local bridge is someone connected to you, but no one else in your social group, and you are connected to them, and no one else in their social group (or at least very few connections between your two groups).
On a final note, the third article is an advice article about how many LinkedIn connections it takes to get LinkedIn to “work” at its best. The advice says that instead of trying to get as many connections as possible, you should try to work on strengthening ties between people you know, or that you want to know. The advice is that you can have as many connections on LinkedIn as you want, but if you aren’t communicating with those in your network, you are letting an opportunity–I believe we can it an opportunity to collaborate–pass you by. And that opportunity could mean the difference between standing in line for three hours at a Career Fair or efficiently accomplishing essentially the same thing from the comfort of your own favorite computer seat.