Business networkers hit the Net

The largest business-oriented online networking site, LinkedIn, recently passed the 13 million-member mark. That’s a lot of networkers. For job-hunters, small-business owners and others interested in making connections for business purposes, a LinkedIn membership is becoming a must.

Luckily, the basic LinkedIn membership is free. It will take you half an hour or so to create a LinkedIn profile, but it’s nothing to stress about; you can change it any time, if your situation changes or if you decide to move things around a little. What’s most important on LinkedIn is your Connections. In fact, without Connections, LinkedIn is pretty much useless, because its primary function is to connect business networkers to one another by way of intermediary connections. So if you’re going to use LinkedIn successfully, you’ve got to connect!

The easy way to do that is to download the free LinkedIn Toolbar, which allows you to check out your Outlook address book for other LinkedIn users. Then, you can launch a Connect-to-me invitation to anyone you like among your contacts, and just like that, you’ve got a LinkedIn network.

Then, when you browse the LinkedIn database and find, say, a person at a local manufacturer that you’d like to make contact with, there’s a good chance you’ll find that you’re connected to this person via one or two intermediate connections. You’ll launch a message-in-a-bottle sort of brief communiqué which your friend(s) will pass on to the intended recipient. That’s how LinkedIn works. It allows the people we know to help us make contact with the people we don’t know (and, of course, allows us to do the same for our friends and colleagues).

The Classmates feature on LinkedIn lets us easily find our former schoolmates, and the Colleagues feature does the same thing for our co-workers at past jobs. That’s a nice feature, because it’s easy to forget about some of our old workmates in the press of day-to-day priorities, and it’s nice to be able to re-connect with them again on LinkedIn.

My favorite LinkedIn feature is the Endorsements feature, which lets us say nice things about the people we’ve worked alongside, with, and for. It’s a very nice thing to be able to leave a midnight endorsement for a long-ago co-worker to find in her inbox the next morning - and not so bad, either, to find one waiting for you, too.

Liz Ryan is a former Fortune 500 VP, a 25-year HR veteran and an expert on careers and the workplace. E-mail her at liz@asklizryan.com