social media sites Archives

The rules and etiquette behind using LinkedIn are relatively simple when compared to other social media sites that are plastered with unwritten, unspoken rules.

The one gray area that still confuses users on the professional networking site, however, lies in the decision to accept or reject invitations from people you don’t actually know.

The very principle of LinkedIn encourages users to grow their network on the site for the sake of possible opportunities and positive partnerships.

The idea of having a vast network of hundreds of professionals can be enticing and often drives people to accept invitations from almost anyone who comes across their page.

After all, there can’t be a real downside to expanding your connections, right?

Of course not. The problem is that you aren’t actually expanding your connections by blindly accepting invitations from strangers on LinkedIn.

That’s because many things tend to be true of those anonymous connections.

For one, you probably won’t ever interact with those people, which makes their presence in your list of digital connections relatively worthless and potentially dangerous.

“I soon discovered the downside to getting linked with people I didn’t know,” USA Today’s Steven Petrow writes. “… If I did connect with someone I didn’t know, I felt even more uncomfortable — you know that old saying about being judged by the company you keep? I realized I didn’t want to be professionally associated with people I don’t know (especially when I heard that one of my connections had been fired from her job for dealing drugs in the workplace!).”

That’s the reality of those seemingly harmless digital connections.

They are real enough that when one of your connections earns a troubling reputation, it could also cause other LinkedIn users to question your integrity as well.

Not to mention the fact that linking with people you don’t really know often just leads to a pointless virtual relationship that eventually gets lost in the sea of faces that are actually familiar to you.

It all points to the fact that there should be some sort of caution in selecting who you want to link with on the site, but that doesn’t mean you should deny every invitation that comes from a person you haven’t shaken hands with.

LinkedIn gives you access to people you may have never had the chance to meet otherwise.

If you are going to accept invitations from strangers, make sure those decisions are industry specific.

Is there something for you to gain from that connection and is there a reason you would want to reach out to them relatively soon?

These types of pairings could lead to potential clients or mutually beneficial professional relationships.

Perhaps the best tool to navigating the tricky waters of “accept or not to accept” is to invest in going premium on the site and first communicate with people via InMail.

It will allow you to actually have an interaction with that person before connecting with them, eliminating the problem of connecting with “strangers” all together.

Other than that, don’t let the desire to have a large number of connections fool you. That number may impress LinkedIn newbies, but the business veterans on the site won’t be moved by a staggering number of accepted invitations paired with a body of work that shows a stunning lack of real connections and face-to-face networking.

Formspring founder Ade Olonoh recently opened up about his journey growing Formspring into a massive social platform and revealed that his success came from his ability to follow the market when it mattered most.

Unlike most social media entrepreneurs, Olonoh actually had no intention to come up with a new social media platform.

Instead, the anonymous question-and-answer site launched from the unexpected success of one of Olonoh’s side projects.

It all started when Olonoh founded Recursive Function, a custom software development company, back in 2006.

Shortly after founding Recursive Function, the company launched a product called Formstack, an online form builder.

Formstack was initially a tool for entrepreneurs that would help them create any type of online form they needed, from surveys to event registrations.

As it turned out, most users wanted to use the service for something else — anonymous question-and-answer forms.

Olonoh created a separate website, Formspring.me, to help people do this with ease.

At the time, he still had no plans of focusing on building a social media website, but the next few weeks revealed there was a serious demand for what he just created.

In only 45 days, more than 1 million users were signed up for Formspring.me.

He now had two very different businesses on his hands and not enough time to devote to both of them.

“One was a social network that was growing quickly and didn’t have a clearly defined business model,” he told Verizon Wireless. “The other was a well-established business that was selling a subscription service to business customers. So they were two different mindsets with teams needed, and both were at a stage where I couldn’t split my time between them.”

While the safe move would be to focus on Formstack, he decided to shift gears and follow a clear desire in the market for Formspring.me, which was later rebranded as just Formspring.

It turned out to be a great success.

Before selling the company, Olonoh raised more than $14 million from investors, and the site garnered more than 30 million users.

He didn’t necessarily leave Formstack either.

Olonoh appointed Chris Byers to run Formstack while he took on special projects for the company.

It was certainly a daring move, but there is no doubt that Formspring became a groundbreaking site in the social media world.

It also saw its fair share of controversy, however, as some users started using the anonymous site as a way to take their bullying to the next level.

People started leaving hurtful comments and crushing accusations on people’s pages.

It was even linked to one Long Island teen’s suicide back in March 2010.

With Formspring being one of the first social sites of its kind, it’s hard to say that anybody could have really predicted the way some cruel youth would go about utilizing the platform.

Either way, Olonoh is focused on Formstack’s success and says the company has been “growing pretty quickly.”

As for the diversity issues that have been plaguing the world of tech, Olonoh said it’s “disheartening,” but he also isn’t sure what the real solution is.

“I don’t know that I present any answers — I don’t have that background and expertise to say, ‘Here’s how you solve that problem,’ ” he added. “But I think it’s a good step that we’re talking about it. The companies are releasing that data, and hopefully that’s the first step toward trying to solve that problem.”