Time for a LinkedIn cull / Random hello

I’m a real advocate for LinkedIn, it has been a game change in helping me:

1. As a visual reminder (people’s faces) to remind me what people look like or to help me find people when meeting them the first time.  I’m terrible at remembering names and faces so it useful as a form of performance support tool!
2. As a ‘little black book’ – I used to have one with contacts numbers in.  I haven’t since, maybe, 2004ish?
3. As my primary professional contacts list – it is possibly just me, but my Microsoft and Google contacts seem to have got quite messed up over the years (presumably via switching between device backups) so LinkedIn is my go to point for sending messages to professional contacts.

At 400 contacts a little over 3 years ago I decided I needed to think about how I used it.  The above three use cases/categories were my outcome from that.  However, I’ve had A LOT of sales people contact me over the last couple of years (my work email is probably 20% spammy sales) so my LinkedIn list has ballooned to 1102 as of October 8th.

Therefore, I’m starting a cull – I’ll pull out people I can’t remember at all, people I suspect are spammy that have slipped through the net, anyone I don’t think would probably ever want to contact me (and me them), etc.

As I will be going through my connections from A-Z I’ll also send a “Hi” to those that jump out as people I’ve not spoken to in ages that I really should have.

Apologies if you get a random notification saying I’ve been looking at your profile – it’s probably me looking back at how we originally connected.

If you are culled and don’t think you should have been (or want to stay connected) then do let me know on here/Twitter/email.

This should then facilitate the site being more of the ‘black book’ that I can go to for ideas, motivation, help and the like as well as cleaning up my feed a bit which has got quite “Facebooky” with some people’s likes and posts.

See you on the other side (possibly).

Author: iangardnergb

My name is Ian Gardner and I am interested in various topics that can be seen as related to learning, technology and information. To see what I am reading elsewhere, follow me on The Old Reader (I.gardner.gb) or LinkedIn. View all posts by iangardnergb