The Effective CIO

Staying Connected December 31, 2007

I’ve spent the past month or so working with various professional networking sites, trying to figure out if the effort is worth the value.

LinkedIn

I’ve been a member of LinkedIn for a long time and found it marginally useful for keeping up with professional peers.  For a long time, there was a problem with critical mass: not enough people joined LinkedIn to make it possible to create a useful professional network. Nonetheless, I’d visit every few weeks (or months) to tidy up my profile and see who had since joined.  I have always resisted the request from LinkedIn to upload my entire contact list so that I can invite them all to join.  While I admire the idea of outsourcing their spam to the grassroots level, I can’t bring myself to send out several hundred “connect to me!” requests to all these unsuspecting people.  Plus, I don’t like to think about rejection in general; soliciting mass rejection on such a scale may be more than I can handle.

Over time, LinkedIn has grown in both stature and size.  I do appreciate the controlled manner in which people must contact each other, which makes it seem so much more grown-up than other networking sites.  There are now a lot of people to be found on LinkedIn, and I find myself connecting to more and more peers.  The level of effort to stay engaged is low, and the value seems to be worth it.  The LinkedIn toolbar is part of my Outlook interface, and it makes finding new connections much easier.  I recommend LinkedIn to others, if only to grow the community to let me connect to them more easily.

Plaxo

Plaxo is an older service that has finally proven its worth to me.  For years I would get these messages from people asking me to visit Plaxo to update my contact information so their address would stay up to date.  This seemed a bit presumptuous and I routinely ignored them.  Can’t people maintain their own address book?

About a month ago, after yet another request, I visited Plaxo to take a deeper look.  The Plaxo feature that sold me was the ability to sync my address book across multiple platforms seamlessly.  After installing the Plaxo plugin into Outlook at work and at home, I now have my contacts replicated at work, at home, on the Plaxo site, and in my phone (via ActiveSync).  This is incredibly useful to me, and makes Plaxo worthwhile if that’s all I used it for.

But wait, there’s more!  Plaxo inspects your contacts, and if it finds that person in Plaxo, gives you the opportunity to update their contact information.  After my initial sync, I corrected several dozen contacts, which was pretty handy.  Conversely, others now get my information, which seems fair.  The best part: you get people’s birthdays, which makes it easy to say “Happy Birthday” when the day arrives.

The last layer of Plaxo is the Plaxo Pulse.  By connecting to certain people in your address book, you enable notification events between the two of you, like adding new connections or making a blog post. You can connect at Business, Friend, or Family levels, which gives increasing access to your personal information.  The whole Pulse thing seems to be in its infancy, but Plaxo has built some interesting connections to other sites (like this one) to automatically feed Pulse information back and forth.  It’s like a tiny version of Facebook, with a smaller, more controlled community.

LinkedXo? PlaxIn?

So the obvious question: when will one of these sites acquire the other?  I want both: controlled professional networking coupled with automatic contact management and activity notification.  Is there some place that does this already that I am missing?

In the meantime, join both.  If nothing else, you’ll be making my life a bit easier.  And hopefully yours, too.