UPDATE:

After posting the blog below, I have joined Linkedin.com and here are some thoughts:

1. It is a good way to stay connected with people and people are for the most part happy to be asked to join your connection list. No one has said no, although failure to say yes may be a no, or it could just be that they don't know how it works and may say yes later. When I signed up, I found two invites from 2005 that were still there and I accepted the invitation. Also, I've gotten some emails from people I invited who I hadn't talked with for a while. That alone made it worth it.

2. It is bascially a list of who you know. You can be passive or active. I'm still sorting out how I will use it to make it most valuable to me, my business and my contacts. Regardless, it is a good way to keep on top of people as they move around. That is the curse of most contact management systems. If someone updates their contact data on Linkedin, it automatically updates that data in my contact list and if I download that to Outlook, I have it current with no work to update manually. Very valuable if it works. One potential flaw however is that if you clik on download vcard, on one of yuor contacts, it gives title, company and email address, but NO phone numbers; even if yuo uploaded that data. AS A RESULT, BE CAREFUL BEFORE OVERWRITING ANY DATA ON YOUR OUTLOOK!

3. It is not a substitute for your regular contact management software/system. How I will use it with that system remains to be seen. I believe you can take data on Linkedin and convert it to Outlook pretty easy, but haven't done so yet.

4. It is a good way to recommend people you respect. I plan on posting some recommendations and testimonials when I can. The people I have invited are people I care about, so recommending them is easy.

5. I have not tried the "request for introduction" feature yet. You get 5 requests free. To get more you need to subscribe and pay the monthly fee. I'm not sure how important this feature will be to me. If I want to be introduced to someone on the list of one of my connections; I'll pick up the phone.

6. One of the down sides I see is that I don't see a good way to organize contacts other than alphabetically. Maybe the upgrade gives this capability. Don't know the answer yet.

7. The upgrade that costs a monthly fee, as far as I can see, is primarily for people who want to email through Linkedin and who want to ask for lots of introductions. It is also for people who want to find qualified job candidates for open positions by posting on Linkedin and making sure their contact list knows the position is open. Nice, I guess, but not sure I need these for my business and the price is a little steep for the top upgrade ($200/month).

Some of my concerns raisedbelow have been calmed. We'll see where it goes, however. Feel free to add any of your own thoughts to this. I welcome other comments. Thanks.

ORIGINAL POST:

Roger Glovsky invited me to join Linkedin.com. To be honest, it has triggered a myriad of thoughts related not so much to Linkedin, but more as to how to use it and how contact management should be handled in general. I have more questions than answers at the moment.

The top line question is "How can we manage contacts in a way that maximizes relationships with those individuals who we want to work with and who will be our best clients, our best referral sources and our best colleagues to refer business to?"

The secondary question is "How do you stay on top of your contact list so that it doesn't become cluttered with names of people that you don't currently have a relationship with (thought you might, but it didn't go anywhere), had a relationship with, but now do not (they moved, changed jobs, sold their business, you had a falling out, etc.) or who you don't want to have a relationship with by choice (personal decision; multitude of reasons)?"

It gets more complicated when you throw in friends, family, professional colleagues, college, high school and law school buddies, vendors, etc. (I know there is probably a way to have different lists, but that leads to the question of how many lists do you keep and who is on what list? What about people that overlap, e.g., a college pal who is also a referral source?). We want to avoid being too fragmented, lest we become a slave to the lists.

I also have questions about confidentiality (Do I want everyone on my list to see everyone else who is on my list? Do I want people to see who my clients and referral sources are? How many other professionals in an area, such as CPA's, are in my list that are competitors, or perceived competitors, to each other?). The list goes on.

I also have human nature questions (If I choose to remove someone, how do you do so without being rude? By removing someone, have you burned a bridge? If someone asks me to join their list and I don't want to, how is that perceived? How should that decision to not join their list be articulated to them? If I ask someone to join and they say no thank you, how should I interpret that? Should I ask them why or just let it go?).

While these may sound more like Junior High School dating quandaries rather than serious business questions, I submit that they are important to consider and if not thought through, could have a material adverse effect on your business. (Yikes, that is something every transaction attorney dreads – the material adverse effect!).

On the positive side, I think if you can develop good procedures and a plan for managing the list, it can become a powerful tool that can enable you to achieve great things, both personally and professionally.

Like most attorneys, I know many many people and continue to meet new people all the time. Our current contact management database has hundreds of people in it, many of whom we have little or no contact with other than a Christmas card each year. We have done a poor job at managing our contact list, in my opinion. It quickly becomes stale and is time consuming and tedious to update. It is more a dead weight rather than a valuable tool for communicating and building.

With the new software we are getting (Tabs3 and Practice Master) we will be setting up protocols that will attempt to keep the list current and vibrant. It will take discipline as we need to be vigilant gatekeepers, but we are up to the task. However, there remain many "How? Who? and When?" questions that need to be answered before we get there.

We are currently building some client service offerings that we believe will be an interesting way to serve business clients in a more proactive and on a more frequent basis. The curse of a transactional attorney is that clients don't always use you when there is no pending deal or imminent need. Time passes and the relationship wanes. Some come back, some don’t. The client forgets.

The business plan we are developing will attempt to address this challenge and will, we hope, be an innovative way to better serve our clients and to grow our business. It is clear, however, that the issues raised above concerning contact management will have a direct bearing on how we will sell these services and to whom.

I would welcome thoughts and feedback from others who have been a part of Linkedin, pro and con. Thanks.