What is Your Favorite LinkedIn Pet Peeve?

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We wake up and visit LinkedIn after booting up our computers.  And before we turn them off at night we are again checking in with LinkedIn.  For the many of us who consider ourselves “Power Users” of LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals is an integral part of our professional lives.  And because of that, there are particular things about LinkedIn that may annoy us in a peculiar way more than others.

I thought that I would write about this as it came up for discussion the other day at a networking group meeting.  These particular attendees pointed out their favorite LinkedIn pet peeves as:

• People who don’t reveal their connections
• People who receive lots of recommendations but don’t give any

I have different experiences and pet peeves, but let me first comment on the above.  First of all, I covered this topic in a past post called “Why Do So Many People Keep Their Contacts Private?”,  but there are many valid reasons why someone would not want to reveal their LinkedIn connections.  At the networking meeting, the impression was that some people did not want to reveal their connections because somehow they thought that they were special or something, but I have a totally different perspective on this and am not bothered by it.  Do you really want to look at my 15,000 connections for someone you know, searching through 500 screens of 30 people per screen to find one person?  Use the Advanced Search functionality…that’s what it’s there for!

As for the imbalance of recommendations written and received, well, I also have an imbalance, but maybe it’s due to my being in transition recently.  I have never really looked at this before, but if I saw someone who had received 20 recommendations and only written 5, I would wonder what this person is about and if they are a good networker.  Still, this doesn’t bother me as I never really thought about it until that recent networking meeting.

As you can imagine, I have many pet peeves concerning LinkedIn, and they seem to rotate and change with each day.  The fact that I have so many connections means that I probably receive a lot more irrelevant mail than most LinkedIn members, but here is my list with my commentary added for your viewing pleasure:

• People who don’t display their photo (or, better yet, show a company logo) – Come on!  Get real!  LinkedIn is a SOCIAL NETWORKING site, so get social!  Or are you a FAKE PROFILE?
• No profile – Who are you?  And why are you on LinkedIn?  If you registered and created a profile, doesn’t it make sense to fill it up?  Or are you a FAKE PROFILE?
• Ask for recommendation even if I don’t know them – If I don’t know you, how the heck can I recommend you?  Are you for real?  Your recommendations certainly aren’t!
• Invitation to irrelevant LinkedIn Groups- Look at my profile, location, and industry.  Don’t invite me to something that I probably wouldn’t be interested in.  Simple enough.  Waste of time.
• Stupid or totally irrelevant questions in the Answers board – Don’t you have any friends that you can ask your silly questions to instead of parading them to 40 million strangers?
• Slow LinkedIn performance – Have you noticed improvements in LinkedIn performance over the last few weeks?  Or is my browser performance improving?  Or both?  Not so many complaints here anymore.
• People I don’t know who invite me before they have (50 or so) connections - I may be a LION, but I also have real friends. What is the purpose of a SOCIAL NETWORK if you aren’t inviting the people you DO know to connect with you?

I must say that the above are all pet peeves of mine.  But the following is my ultimate LinkedIn pet peeve of recent:

• Adding my email address to your marketing databases after connecting

Look, just because we are connected, it doesn’t mean that you have some right to put me on a mailing list to send me something that I may not be even potentially interested in.  A LinkedIn connection is just that; I am a networker, not a potential customer.  Before you put someone on a mailing list, think twice: social media is a great thing in that you can blast your message to a lot of people, but you can also piss off a lot of people, and their complaints can spread like wildfire, as viral as the best of those marketing message campaigns out there.  Now if you are sending me something that I may be interested in by looking at my profile and further understanding me, I may be more inclined to buy from you.  If not, take me off your mailing list before I start blogging about company names and people who do this to avoid.  Thank you.

Always interested in hearing about your LinkedIn pet peeves, so please feel free to comment!