I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.
This is the standard message that LinkedIn created for you, so you can ask others to connect with you.
It is succinct, and universally applicable. It's also self-evident, and therefore, unhelpful. Of course I want to add you to my network – if I didn't, would I be asking you to join it?
The Problem Those 11 words are actively preventing LinkedIn users from developing the skills they need to network more successfully.
What if you walked up to someone you encountered at a conference and (without providing any context) said, "I'd like to add you to my professional network"?
The response would probably be something along the lines of, "Why? Who are you?" And perhaps, "Is there any benefit to me?"
[Those 11 words prevent LinkedIn users from networking more successfully]
LinkedIn created this introduction to remove an obstacle to reaching out, and to make it easier for people to connect with each other. But the most helpful thing that LinkedIn could do here would be to make it slightly harder to connect.
How LInkedIn Can Help Instead of pre-populating the "personal note" in the message window, LinkedIn should do two things:
Leave the message window empty, and
Prevent you from sending the invite until you've typed in your own, truly personal message.
This would help the sender learn the art of introducing oneself and one's networking goals to a desirable contact.
And it would help the recipient to understand why they are receiving the message in the first place.
Which is more helpful and effective? This?:
"Dear Andy - Greetings from Denver. I'm seeking a position in annual giving after 6 years in student events. I notice we share mutual contacts, including your former assistant director, whom I know from grad school. I'd be grateful if we could connect via LinkedIn. In return, my own network may prove valuable as you add staff for your newly-announced capital campaign."
Or this?:
"I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn."
Duh.
It's time for LinkedIn to make us tell each other something we don't already know.
Alumni communities serve critical roles in many kinds of organizations – not only in schools, colleges or universities. This article is the second in a series of short interviews with professionals from non-traditional alumni programs. Read the first profile here: Dean Dwigans of the Marshall European Center for Security Studies.
Profile: Brant Ust Director of Alumni Relations and 18U National Baseball Team USA Baseball (Durham, NC)
For much of the last year, I've had the pleasure of advising USA Baseball (the National Governing Body for the sport) on alumni relations. Below, Alumni Futures readers can learn about the organization's efforts under its first alumni director, Brant Ust.
A Notre Dame alumnus and two-time USA National Team player, Brant's career highlights include his selection as a 6th round draft pick of the Detroit Tigers, nine years of pro ball, including time in the Red Sox, Pirates and Mariners organizations, and a stint as assistant coach for the University of Michigan.
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Alumni Futures:Brant, how does the concept of "alumni relations" fit into the strategy of a sports-focused organization like USA Baseball?
Brant Ust: Alumni Relations for USAB is focused on being a part of our athletes', coaches' and staff members' lives beyond the time they wear the Red, White and Blue. In other words, establishing a connection that starts from the first day they're a part of a USAB National Team experience, and that continues throughout their collegiate, professional and post-baseball lives.
AF: Before taking up alumni responsibilities, you were a professional ball player and a college coach. Did any of that prepare you for a role in alumni relations, and if so, in what ways?
BU: Absolutely. My experiences as a player and coach have been key to establishing what we believe are useful ways to serve our alumni at various stages of their careers. I draw on experiences from my playing career when envisioning what we can do, and how we should be serving our alumni.
[The USA Baseball experience is powerful... It creates a special, long lasting connection...]
AF: What are some of the obstacles you face in establishing your alumni program, and how do you plan to overcome them?
BU: We have a broad spectrum of alumni, from our 14U National Team through our World Baseball Classic (Major League Baseball) alumni, and everything in between. It requires a lot of support from within the organization, following and updating our alums’ accomplishments and current ‘locations’ in baseball and in life.
We don't have the years of relationship that a university has with alumni, but the uniqueness of the USA Baseball experience – representing one’s country, playing in the Olympics – is powerful, and is often experienced at a crucial time during their overall baseball development. So it creates a special, lasting connection between USAB and the individual.
Celebrating World Cup Gold, 2009. Photo courtesy of USA Baseball. Click to enlarge.
AF: You have more than 2,500 alumni, including players, coaches and staff. What resources do you have for serving this audience?
BU: In 2011 we've been getting out to ‘reconnect’ with our alumni; Major League Baseball Spring Training visits, email correspondence, the creation of a USAB alumni–specific logo, an Alumni Edition of our USAB Magazine, reconnecting with our young alumni via the Minor Leagues, and a USAB Alumni presence on Twitter and Facebook.
We also integrate our alumni into current USAB events, camps, and National Team schedules. For example, on our coaching staff we have Brooks Badeaux (Pro National Team, Baseball World Cup ’05). This coaching experience will connect him as an alumnus, as well as provide our players with quality instruction from someone who has been where they are, and where they are striving to be.
We use input from a myriad of alumni relations sources, from traditional university examples to athletic groups to professional associations. We share the same challenges and goals while having a distinct alumni profile. We're proud that the bookends of our alumni database are prominent Major League players: Jim Abbott ’87–’88 and Ryan Zimmerman ‘05.
AF: One last question. Can you get me World Series tickets?
New in 2011: Profiles Alumni communities serve critical roles in many kinds of organizations – not only in schools, colleges or universities. This year I'll post short interviews with professionals from some non-traditional alumni programs.
Last year, while teaching a workshop for the European Association for International Education in Paris, I met Capt. Dean Dwigans, U.S. Navy. In addition to his career as a military Judge Advocate, Dean (now retired from the Navy after a 25 year career) took on the role of alumni executive at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.
I interviewed Dean to learn more about how his work at the Marshall Center compares with traditional alumni programs.
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Alumni Futures:Dean, you spent your career in the U.S. Navy, focused on legal practice and more recently, teaching international law. How have you managed the transition to alumni relations work?
Dean Dwigans: I really enjoy the alumni business, especially in the international environment. I get to apply creativity and energy to developing meaningful and lasting relationships with, and among our 8,000 graduates from more than 100 nations. I'm in the government end of it, but I hope to stay engaged in general alumni relations discussions and training, which I find very useful. I brought back many ideas from the EAIE workshop in Paris, for example.
AF: You and I exchanged some thoughts about the "magic formula" for successful alumni work. I said, "Relevance + Access = Engagement." Do you think that's true in your organization?
DD: As long as the definition of "relevance" includes being meaningful and responsive to alumni needs, I think it's a valid short-hand for success.
The Marshall Center has unique focus: building a network of security professionals to create a more stable security environment. We advance democratic institutions, promote active and peaceful security cooperation, and enhance partnerships among nations in North America, Europe, and Eurasia. This is instead of, say, fundraising, marketing our programs, or other more traditional alumni association roles.
But I also see how we're similar to traditional programs. When I look at communications from some civilian alma maters, I'm sometimes put off by the emphasis on fundraising in almost every contact. At the Marshall Center, we have to offer our graduates something useful that applies directly to them or they'll tune us out, and I think civilian institutions should do the same. We promise our graduates that we'll stay in contact, continue to help them grow professionally, and provide a forum for their ideas.
AF:What kinds of activities and programs do you have in place?
DD: We get to know each student while they're in residence. We then work hard to stay in contact from the moment they leave, offer programs "in country" at least once a year, and invite some alumni back each year for professional training, and for contact with other alumni and with faculty. We have a new, improved web presence coming online this year to make collaboration and distance education easier – helping us stay in contact with alumni worldwide.
Our magazine, per Concordiam, is devoted to alumni research and writing. Our "communities of interest" track the subject matter of our resident programs, and we have conferences several times a year for small groups of distinguished alumni. They serve in important, visible roles – ambassadors, defense ministers, and parliamentarians. Our goal is to have contact with each of our 8,000 alumni twice a year, even if it's just to update their contact information.
I'm now trying to put this all into a strategic plan, to focus and coordinate our efforts, and help me explain our program to senior leadership.
AF:What resources do you have to deliver on these goals?
DD: I have a staff of eight, with five devoted to specific regions where they're responsible for maintaining the relationship and knowing the graduates' needs. Three staff members are devoted to alumni events. The Marshall Center is a U.S.–German partnership, and we teach in three languages – English, Russian and German. So our regional representatives speak multiple languages to communicate with alumni. We also benefit from very supportive and involved leadership, which is vital to any alumni program.
AF:What are your biggest challenges, and where do you see the greatest opportunity?
DD: We have a relatively narrow educational mission, compared with a liberal arts college for example. But the challenges that governments face now are so varied and complex that we have to expand our educational efforts. Cybersecurity, crime and corruption, immigration, disaster relief, negotiation and mediation, border security, the environment, religion, trade issues, international law – the list is endless. We keep alumni up to date with lectures, resident courses, and conferences on these topics. The quarterly alumni magazine focuses 80% of its content on one of these topics, and a mix of the other topics for the remaining 20%. We also try to maximize the use of technology and virtual interaction.
We get our students involved very early. I'm one of the first people they hear from. I welcome them before they arrive, and ask them to join the Alumni Knowledge Portal. On the Portal we provide travel information, area info, class schedules and other information they need for settling in. We meet with them when they arrive, introduce them more thoroughly to the Portal, invite them for private or country meetings, host field trips, and talk to them all again before they depart. We see many of them every day while they're here, and they become not only alumni, but our good friends as well. But I learn more from them than they do from me, especially when I visit them after they've returned home. They've opened my mind to new perspectives, and they reinforce how we're all committed to the same goal – a peaceful, productive existence for our families and nations.
After all this interaction, they know who we are, and we in turn have a very good idea of their needs. That's one of the keys to our ultimate success.
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Photos by Karlheinz Wedhorn. Top: Woerner Hall at the Marshall European Center. Below: Interior of the large plenary at the Marshall Center.
The Problem In a recent email exchange, a colleague raised questions about what may be a growing problem within LinkedIn, the online business networking platform: fraudulent profiles. He showed how a specific user had crafted a phony LinkedIn profile, then used it to establish connections with hundreds of legitimate LinkedIn users.
My colleague backed up his claim with several observations:
"It is highly likely that the entire profile is fake.
A Google search results in zero hits for his name. The list of elite employers (Goldman, McKinsey, BCG, Booz, etc.) in his LinkedIn profile is not only preposterous, there's no record he ever worked at the firm where I worked. Yesterday he listed 15 months as an "analyst," which does not exist as a role/title at that company. Today he shows 3 months as an intern there. Never mind the myriad typos in the names of companies he allegedly worked for."
Why is this a problem? Because many LinkedIn members (mistakenly) believe that a bigger network is always better, and are eager to add names to their Connections list. If someone says he was an intern at a firm where you once worked, then shouldn't you connect with him?
Yes. But only if the credentials are real.
The Value Play by LinkedIn Like Facebook, LinkedIn is aggregating a massive amount of information about its members' networks, interests, and behavior. This has tremendous value for advertisers and potential buyers or investors. So the long-term effect of passively encouraging fraudulent behavior includes erosion of the network's value. A phony user can lift the email address from the profile of any first-degree connection. The "good" citizens of LinkedIn will have their networks usurped for fraud, or at least for spamming purposes, harming the enterprise as a whole.
As a company with ambitions to go public or be bought, LinkedIn must ensure the greatest possible value for its members' profiles, their connections, and their network behavior. It is not in LinkedIn's interest to hunt down people with phony high-end credentials – quite the opposite. A network with these credentials in it is more valuable to them – so long as the credentials may be real. Besides, hunting down phonies is a high-overhead activity for the site's managers.
In fact, it's probably better to let network members themselves report others whose credentials they suspect, or whom they believe to be violating the Terms of Service. But that reveals another problem.
How to Report Fraudulent Profiles LinkedIn makes it very difficult to report fraudulent behavior. Scroll to the very bottom of a LinkedIn profile page and click "Customer Service," and you can search for help on a topic. Type in "Abuse" to obtain search results that require you to click again, until you can finally learn that LinkedIn "takes these matters very seriously." Then you have the opportunity to click once more, so you may fill out a generic form for asking a question. Image below shows LinkedIn's abuse reporting mechanism.
What to Do? Network Strategically A social network's integrity is as strong as the weakest link it contains. When a LinkedIn user connects to someone he doesn't know personally and whose work he cannot vouch for, the entire network is weakened and potentially at risk. Community policing of the network requires everyone to adhere to relatively conservative rules about connecting.
This is strategic networking: seeking and establishing connections that you can trust, with people whose own networks may be valuable to you.
Notably, there is an entire movement with an opposing philosophy, so-called "open-networking" (identifiable in some cases by the acronym LION in a profile: "LinkedIn Open Networker." This approach may be useful in some cases to sales people and some job seekers, but I never knowingly connect to open networkers).
So, with these issues in mind, what can one do? Here are two simple alternatives:
Choose not to use LinkedIn This is actually reasonable for the vast majority of business people. But increasingly (for better or worse), people believe that having a LinkedIn profile is the mark of a "serious professional," so there is a possible adverse side-effect from refusing to participate in the site.
Connect only with individuals whose work you can vouch for directly This conservative approach supports the highest long-term value for your social capital. If you want your network to be reliable, fill it with people you trust.
This isn't network science, it's common sense.
What do you think about this issue? A non-problem? A minor inconvenience? A threat to online trust? Or something else? Leave a comment, and if you're a fan of open networking, tell us why.
Note: This blog posting probably violates LinkedIn Terms of Service item 10.B.10, because I deep-linked to a page other than LinkedIn's home page. I'll take the links out if they ask me to, but I'm doing it to educate LinkedIn users so the company's product is more likely to be used in the way it was intended to be used.
[Alumni Futures is partnering with Charlie Melichar's Intermedia blog this week, to share some views on the changing landscape of institutional advancement in education. Read Charlie's interview with Andrew Gossen, Cornell University's new senior director for social media strategy as a companion posting to my comments below.]
I've been thinking a lot recently about something I heard on a SelectMinds webinar a couple of years ago.
Ethan McCarty, program manager for Greater IBM (the corporate alumni community for current and former IBM employees worldwide) was discussing social media. He described how IBM was connecting the organization to its audience via its sprawling, worldwide LinkedIn Group (more than 46,000 members today). A webinar participant asked how IBM measures the return on investment for social tools. McCarty replied, "What's the ROI for your phone service?"
In other words, online networks are part of the fabric now, they're what people do. They are as critical to many businesses as telephone service is. Online community is not an experiment or a half-measure to make up for the fact that people won't read your direct mail pieces.
Our work requires ever-increasing incorporation of online networks and so-called social media – these are tools for doing our work, not just "programs and services" that we offer. So what are the implications for alumni relations? One implication is that staffing models, organizational structure and professional roles must change, and change soon.
Cornell University (Ithaca, New York, USA) is adapting to these opportunities by creating permanent roles that embed these practices in the alumni relations effort. Their decisions raise the bar for how alumni offices incorporate social tools into traditional engagement. I asked Cornell's Associate Vice President for Alumni Relations, Chris Marshall, to comment on their rationale.
Chris told me,
I've hired most of our team members for their ability to motivate and manage volunteers, to develop deep relationships, to plan strategic events, and to work hand-in-hand with fundraisers. Asking staff with those specialized skills to also become experts in a rapidly-evolving field like social media, with its complicated task of collecting, synthesizing, and reporting metrics, simply won't get the job done. I believe we need dedicated staff in these areas for alumni affairs to succeed.
We’ve decided that social media is going to be the primary way we ‘touch’ most of our 215,000 alumni. We also believe it will help us advance our relationships with key donors and volunteer leaders. So we have to do it right, and have to show our results with data. That’s why we’ve hired Andrew Gossen as our Senior Director of Social Media Strategy, and given Jennifer Cunningham the title of Senior Director, Marketing Strategy and Business Analytics.
This doesn't mean that other staff members are off the hook and don't need to know or think about the newer tools that alumni are using. A new hire today should be familiar with social sites and comfortable using them for alumni engagement, in ways that make sense in their own organization.
Other organizations, such as the Stanford Alumni Association, have also begun carving out these roles even in the face of limited resources. By measuring the results analytically, these front-runners will be able to show how our online efforts influence alumni relationships (with each other and with our institutions), and to what extent. This is the beginning of an important new direction for alumni relations, communications, and development staffing models.
I spend almost all my effort with this blog talking about academic alumni associations and the schools they support. Once or twice, I've mentioned corporate alumni associations.
Now there's a new category to cover: government alumni associations.
The Bush-Cheney Alumni Association is the first I've seen for people who worked for a presidential (or gubernatorial) administration, as staff members, interns or volunteers. I searched for a similar organization for Clinton administration alumni but came up empty. If you know of other, similar organizations and their activities, leave a comment.
I heard about the Bush-Cheney site when Inside Higher Ed described it in its Quick Takes section Monday, and drew attention to the site's description of "the Bush Record." As of today, this section featured the following variety of reading choices for historical perspective:
"Praise for President’s
Accomplishments" "More Praise for President’s
Accomplishments" "Praise Continues for
President’s Accomplishments"
Obviously, the Bush-Cheney Alumni Association is going to promote the work of its namesakes, so it's not surprising that documents praising their achievements would be available for download. The three files comprise well over 200 pages of essays, editorials, and encomiums that laud the administration's work.
But as seriously as I want to treat this, I am still amused by the straight-faced delivery of the documents' titles. Click image to view in separate window:
Last June I read an interesting post on Cem Sertoglu's blog, Sortipreneur. The title of the posting was Mistakes in Proprietary Networks, and although at first it didn't seem too relevant to alumni relations, the more I think about it, the more relevant it becomes.
Cem, co-founder of corporate alumni relations leader SelectMinds, said
...in the early 1990s, the telcos were racing each other in building their
proprietary [physical] networks...and the quest to create the dominant network
was on, with the "networks' intelligence" positioned as the key
differentiator....
Then came the stupidest network of all: the Internet. All it knew was
to push IP packets around. There was no intelligence built in to the
network. The intelligence resided on the edge.
Cem described the limited utility of "brand community" social networks. People whose only connection to each other is that they have the same cell phone provider (to use Cem's example) are missing something that gives value – and "intelligence" – to networks. (Just two hours before I posted the article you're reading now, blogger Phil Barrett wrote about "the failure of mobile-centric social networks" like Nokia's Mosh.)
Useful networks form when Person A needs something Person B has. A system intelligent enough to allow Person A to find Person B is a useful network. The more people in the network, the higher its potential intelligence becomes - and the more paths there are, on average, between network members.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, alumni networks are closed "brand community" networks. By definition they have a size limit, and therefore have limited total potential intelligence. One way to increase alumni networks' intelligence is to open them in ways that respect the members' school (or corporate) affinity, while providing access to a larger, open network of far-reaching intelligence.
So Cem was right. The internet, as he said, is a "stupid network." But the open social networks at its edge (like LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Viadeo and others) provide intelligence, because they connect people who need to find one another. Our alumni communities do the same thing, but only for extremely limited populations.
An ancient Greek poet named Archilochus, wrote (in a phrase made over-simplistically famous by Sir Isaiah Berlin) that "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Our alumni communities are smart like the hedgehog. Each one rolls up into a ball to keep out interlopers. Online, an alumni network knows everything its alumni know, but nothing more.
To thrive and grow, alumni networks need the many things the rest of the internet knows. They need us to connect them to the networked world around them.
Embattled U.S. government contractor Blackwater has started an alumni association. [Note: If you allow pop-ups in your browser, this link may launch an automatic download of a PDF file from the Blackwater website. This file is their alumni newsletter.]
The alumni web pages read like those of many corporate alumni groups:
The Blackwater Alumni Association is attempting to reach those who have trained here, those employed here and those who were once employed here and left in good standing....
As the Blackwater Alumni Association grows, you will find programs and opportunities to be involved [sic] including projects of good will and the chance to participate in alumni-exclusive events.
OK. Another employer using good alumni relations practice (and, unfortunately, poor proof-reading) to pursue many of the benefits mentioned in my June posting about corporate alumni relations.
But the next sentence caught me a little off guard - so to speak:
In the near future, an annual Blackwater Alumni Association shooting tournament will be announced, limited to association members.
Given recent media coverage of Blackwater's activities overseas, this struck me as ill-conceived - at best - from a public relations standpoint.
I guess shooting is something many of their contract employees need to know how to do, given their work assignments. But there are an awful lot of other competitions the company could sponsor. It almost makes you long for a golf tournament.
Meanwhile, Blackwater should probably include something about alumni in future issues of its alumni newsletter. [PDF download]
