Online networking offers great expectations
The peewee hockey game is tied with less than two minutes in the final period. Parents of the youngsters are standing on the bleachers in the cold, damp arena cheering for their budding superstars. One of them scores the winning goal, but the hero’s father doesn’t notice. He can’t. He’s at home, hunkered down in his attic writing feverishly.
It has always been his dream to write the great American novel. But working 40 hours a week as a computer programmer has relegated his dream to evenings and weekends—which isn’t ideal for being a hockey dad.
The sacrifice will be worth it, though, once his book is published, he keeps telling himself. Or, will it? Two years later, after many more missed hockey games, the book is finished, but no publishers have responded to his letters, e-mails, phone calls, and door knocking.
He doesn’t know where to turn next. During one of his routine checks of email, as he prays for a response, nothing is there except an e-mail from his alma mater. He clicks on it in frustration.
The subject reads: LinkedIn for Carnegie Mellon Alumni
He reads on.
Carnegie Mellon Alumni,
The Office of Alumni Relations is pleased to invite all Carnegie Mellon graduates to join the new Carnegie Mellon Alumni group on LinkedIn, the online professional networking tool that helps you find inside connections to jobs, industry experts, and business partners. LinkedIn is an online network of more than 7.5 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 130 industries.
Alumni and select other members of the Carnegie Mellon community (including students, faculty, and staff) register directly with LinkedIn and then have access to the Carnegie Mellon Alumni LinkedIn group. Through the Carnegie Mellon Alumni group you can:
- Leverage the power of your alumni community to find and reach new business contacts;
- Accelerate your career through referrals from the Carnegie Mellon Alumni group;
- Post and distribute job listings, as well as search for great jobs;
- View detailed profiles of fellow students, alumni, faculty, and staff of Carnegie Mellon;
- - Show a vast network of fellow alumni and their contacts what you have to offer.
He needs to read no further. Clicking on the LinkedIn Web site, www.LinkedIn.com, he joins thousands of others in the free members-only Carnegie Mellon group.
His networking begins. First, he completes a profile that summarizes his professional accomplishments. From there, he has numerous options. Once he identifies a person in the network he knows, he can establish a “connection.” That person may have a “connection” with another “connection” who happens to be a publisher. The aspiring novelist can also do a keyword search using terms such as publishing, literary agent, or entertainment. Another option is to search by company, location, member name, or member title. For whatever networking leads he finds, he has an automatic in. They both have ties to Carnegie Mellon.
In that scenario, this is the kind of networking that can open doors, says Manu Kumar (E’95, CS’97), a former board member of the Alumni Association. He believes LinkedIn is poised to be the premier networking tool for University alumni, provided enough people participate. “The ultimate measure of success is how well alumni are able to leverage their common bond to the University,” he says. “By using LinkedIn, they have the tool to mine those alumni connections.”
Erik Larson (IM’96), a current board member, agrees with Kumar’s assessment. He has been “LinkedIn” for more than a year now as chair of the association’s communications committee. He believes LinkedIn will foster connections, which could lead to face-to-face meetings, interviews, or invitations to various networking events, such as Carnegie Mellon’s Network Nights.
Larson offers a suggestion to those planning to join. “Maintain contact with your connections—this takes effort and should not be limited to the Internet,” he says. “I actively manage my connections, just as I would if the information were in an old-fashioned Rolodex. To my way of thinking, that is the only way to have a network, as opposed to a stack of business cards, electronic or paper.”
For Judy Cole, associate vice president and director of alumni relations, she felt it was important to give Carnegie Mellon’s alumni this 21st-century networking option. The Office of Alumni Relations began exploring professional networking Web sites—including LinkedIn—in the spring of 2004 but did not want to commit to a single provider until it was clear which company(ies) would survive. After two years of growth, LinkedIn, and its 7.5 million members, became an obvious choice.
“In networks, size matters,” says Cole. Alumni, if they choose to do so, can go outside the University’s group and search the 7.5 million–member database.
Of course, Larson adds, there are no guarantees for aspiring novelists or for aspiring inventors, entrepreneurs, and entertainers, but it’s a valuable starting point. “I can literally see the interconnections between those people I know and talk with regularly, and the members of those individuals' networks. It allows me to be more aligned between my networking activities and my personal and professional objectives. With traditional networking alone, the amount of return on my time is much less than when I add the capabilities of LinkedIn and the Carnegie Mellon group to the mix.”
Carnegie Mellon alumni, faculty, staff, and students can join LinkedIn at no charge by logging on to the Web Site: www.LinkedIn.com.
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