LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an online network of more than 24 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries.

When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients, and partners. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you.

Your network consists of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to thousands of qualified professionals.

Through your network you can:
-Find potential clients, service providers, subject experts, and partners who come recommended
-Be found for business opportunities
-Search for great jobs
-Discover inside connections that can help you land jobs and close deals
-Post and distribute job listings
-Find high-quality passive candidates
-Get introduced to other professionals through the people you know

LinkedIn is free to join. [They] also offer paid accounts that give you more tools for finding and reaching the right people, whether or not they are in your network.

Above information from from Linkedin.com.

There are a multitude of Social Media Networking sites from Twitter to Plaxo to Facebook to MySpace, etc. They all have their own unique personalities and features and functions. But if you have limited time to invest in social media, like me, then how do you know which one or ones are worth your time? If I had to pick one, which I have, it would be Linkedin for business purposes.

LinkedIn is not one of the sexy, trendy programs in the shiny world of social media. Instead, LinkedIn is more than just another place to "add your friends." It's actually one of the world's best virtual networking tools. That it's "Six Degrees of Connectivity" translated into the business world. It's a great tool to build your business.

For years I received multitudes of requests from friends and colleagues to connect to them on LinkedIn. I never paid attention to these overtures until recently. I joined LinkedIn a few months back and initially starting adding all my friends from my contact list and exploring friend's contact lists to see who they were connected to. I updated my profile and started reviewing LinkedIn’s features. Now I have become an avid user. Presently I have 61 connections and 5,487 in my network since as of July 18th.

Once you join, forgetting to revisit and make use of LinkedIn is a big mistake if you run the type of business that relies on making contacts. LinkedIn's search feature isn’t about finding contacts you know, but finding contacts YOU NEED to know. The whole "degrees of contact" concept provides invaluable insight into how to make contact with new people and new companies.

For those new to LinkedIn, the site will track the connections between you and every other member of the site and will tell you how many "degrees" apart you are from any one contact. First Degree means you know them personally, Second Degree means you know someone who knows them, Third degree means they're a friend of a friend of a friend, etc.

Using LinkedIn’s search feature is a way to “daisy chain” your contacts and meet new people to expand your business. That means working your network to expand your network! You can ask your connections to introduce you to some of their connections that might turn into business for you. Sometimes it pays off and sometimes you never hear anything back. Either way, it's far more effective than sending blind emails or making cold calls. You get an added boost of credibility when you are introduced by someone who knows you. If you trust your contacts then you trust their referrals and recommendations. Give recommendations about your friends and associates which will be displayed and tabulated on LinkedIn and get them in return.

Those aren’t the only reasons to use LinkedIn of course. There are groups of like-minded people for a wide range of topics you can join and make contact with and you can send out questions and surveys to get feedback from your personal contacts. There's great value in those things. But for me, the real value of LinkedIn is in using it to discover the hidden connections among my network and the rest of the world. You never know who you almost know. Why not find out?

If you would like to get Linkedin with George Dubec go to http://www.linkedin.com/in/georgedubec.