LION, in the LinkedIn world, stands for Linked In Open Networker.  I believe the term was first coined by the gentleman that began the Lions’ Lair at www.themetanetwork.com, Christian Mayaud (who is a top networker himself).  You can find out more background through one of Stan Relihan’s podcast where he interviews Christian (please see my Links section for the URL).

LIONs basically are open to networking with people that they have never met before, and they are important in the fact that they bridge networks of closed people.  If we all follow the standard rule of LinkedIn and say “I Don’t Know” for every invite that we receive from someone who we have never personally met, it would be hard for closed networks to grow into each other and evolve into the great networking community that LinkedIn is today.  So LIONs, in general, accept invites from anyone or at least will not give you the dreaded “I Don’t Know” as a response to your invitation.  With this in mind, it is relatively risk-free to invite a LION that you found in an Advanced Search into your network.

That being said, there is no authority that governs LinkedIn (other than LinkedIn itself, obviously), and thus if a LION (someone who puts LION in their profile on their headline, for instance) responds to an invite with an “IDK”, they are not penalized.  You are.  I have received an IDK from a “LION” who put the term next to their name on their headline.  I even wrote them with a Wikipedia definition of what LION means (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkedIn_Open_Networker) and asked them to invite me into their network to cancel out their “mistake”, but it was to no avail.

In conclusion, while it is relatively safe to invite a LION into your network, there is no guarantee that you will not receive an IDK.  That is why it is important to review every LION’s profile and contact details to confirm whether or not they really do welcome your invite or not.

“Does LinkedIn discourage LIONs” is a question I received from a reader after reading this post. LinkedIn apparently _originally_ did not like LIONs, and that is why they only display up to 500 connections per person as well as limit the number of invitations that you can send out.  I believe that they wanted to keep a community of professionals which would be full of high quality, trustworthy networks without people getting spammed.  I think that some people who just wanted to connect with everyone in the early days or perhaps some spammers may have ruined this for others, but I don’t know.  LinkedIn wants people to
know each other when they connect, and that is why they give you an option to send a seemingly innocent “I Don’t Know” as a way to turn down a connection.

Recently, LinkedIn has allowed LION groups to exist on LinkedIn, so they are taking a more neutral stance.  In fact, the ability to search for LION groups in the groups section, which just began a week or so
ago, has made it easier to join LION groups.  However, they still place limitations on those who have a lot of connections and send out lots of invites.

So, in the end, I would say that traditionally LinkedIn has discouraged but now they are more neutral towards LIONs.  I will also add that 1) I am a big fan of LinkedIn and believe we all need to follow the rules of etiquette as outlined in the End User Agreement which we agree to when we sign up, and 2) although I have been a user since 2004, only in 2008 have I become a LION, so there are many more in the community who understand this topic in more depth.  I welcome everyone’s comments to this post so that we can all get a better understanding of the history behind this.  Peace to all!