Facibus Reviews

At last night’s Canberra IA Cocktail Hour discussion turned to Facebook invitations. Some of us get a lot of them, and sometimes we wonder how we know the inviter.

Penelope Trunk has the following advice for inviting people to LinkedIn. I’ve been a LinkedIn user for a while now - I can see the applicability of this to Facebook:

1. Don’t say yes to an invitation from a person you don’t really know.
LinkedIn works best as a way to leverage your professional circle of people you know well or know their work well. I love looking through my friends’ professional networks to get an idea of what introductions I could possibly get from a friend. My friend can say to her friend, “This is Penelope, you should get to know her because of x.� But this only works if my friend actually knows me and the other person well. Otherwise, I may as well make the introduction myself.

In that respect, your network on LinkedIn is really only as strong as your ties to the people in it. You will get more benefits from LinkedIn if you have a network of 30 people you know well than 300 people you don’t really know.

2. Don’t send invitations to people who don’t know you.
I feel like I kinda know Mike Arrington. I know I’d like to have dinner with him (does he ever stop blogging to have dinner?) I read his blog every day, and I know the type of connections he could offer me. But he doesn’t know me. Even if I have emailed him three times and posted ten comments on his blog, he doesn’t know who I am. He probably reads 400 emails and comments a day.

…5. Remind me how I know you.
Sometimes, I do actually know someone, but I communicate with so many different people every day, that I don’t remember. Yesterday I got an invitation that said, “It was great to do the podcast interview with you today� right before the standard LinkedIn invitation text. That was great. I knew exactly who the woman was and I connected. This also brings up another point, which is act immediately. The best invitations come right after you’ve made one, solid connection with a given person. For example, if you go back and forth in email six times, send an invitation that day.

What’s the easiest way to screw up a Facebook invitation? By getting it to run through your GMail or Outlook address book and inviting everyone you’ve ever emailed without thought. Chances are there are a lot of people that were CC recipients of mailing list responses from 12 months back that don’t know you from a bar of soap - you have no reason to invite these people to be Facebook friends, so don’t invite them.