Interview of Joe Gillespie

Joe is a proven CIO and Executive Consultant and Partner in a national organization, B2B CFO/CIO, and in the past has been a very successful CEO launching his own company, CIO for a couple of NYSE listed companies, and CFO for another NYSE listed company. Joe will make “IT” happen for your organization. With a reputation as an innovative change agent, Joe enables growth and creates competitive advantage for organizations through IT enabled solutions while controlling and reducing expenses, producing bottom line profits.
Bio: (Click here)
Website: www.b2bcio.com

i) What you like about Linkedin?

[Joe] Compared to other community sites the percentage of more senior executives is much higher and LinkedIn has also established critical mass with over 4 million members.

ii) How does linkedin helped you?

[Joe] I’ve had some job interviews where I didn’t initiate the contact, I’ve had business opportunities, and I have gained some critical exposure as well as establishing some critical relationships. It also gives me a great deal of personal satisfaction by being able to help others in what may be some very significant ways.

iii) Has your business increased by using linkedin? Please explain:

[Joe] It’s hard to say and I’ve spent most of my professional time working for NYSE listed companies but now my business is focused on serving small to medium businesses. These companies don’t use LinkedIn yet, but when I need resources for them I do leverage my contacts to bring talent to bear on a specific problem.

iv) How do you select contact to whom you want to connect?

[Joe] I used to be very active at trying to reach out to new people. Through organizations I often contacted fellow members, especially when I found them already in LinkedIn and they had several existing LinkedIn connections. For one organization I have 20,000 plus executives in my other contacts file and over 2,000 of these are currently LinkedIn members. If I wanted to farm these I could certainly add a few more connections pretty quickly from these. This does take a considerable amount of time though. Earlier this year I was #8 as far as the number of overall connections but I have only sent out a handful of connection requests over the last six months since I’m more focused on starting up a couple of new companies at this point and LinkedIn has changed their policies. They now sell the ability for a few bucks to reach out to anyone through InMail which reduces the incentive to create your own connections. The more connections you have and create, the more work you end up doing on behalf of LinkedIn by evaluating and forwarding requests of others as a super-connector. I now have well over ½ million connections within only two degrees. LinkedIn considers super-connectors in the same regard as spammers vs. a critical gateway and component of their network that glues everything together. They should provide a feedback score like eBay as recognition or some higher membership level for providing this service but the opposite attitude seems to be prevalent in LinkedIn.

v) Your thoughts on "Quality vs Quantity" connections?

[Joe] Quality is treating everyone as you’d expect to be treated. Having a large network does means that you may not know everyone as well as you’d like but a weak connection is still better than having no connection. You also can’t prejudge the value of a connection. You never know what you might need and the future and that might just be the person with the relationship you need. So I’m a fan of Quantity but don’t think it’s necessarily an either or situation. I also don’t understand people that will only connect with people they already know through LinkedIn. If they don’t want to reach out and get to know others, then why are they on LinkedIn? If they only want to keep up with their existing contacts, Plaxo does a much better job for a lot less effort. To network you have to have an attitude to first give and without an expectation to receive anything back from a specific contact. That doesn’t mean that you don’t ever get anything back but it’s not quid pro quo.

v) Would you do it all over again if you were starting from scratch with LinkedIn?

[Joe] I have made a huge investment of my time and have been very active in some of the related Yahoo forums before changing my focus about six months ago and scaling back my efforts as I mentioned. I’ve been asking that question myself. I’d like to think I would do it all over again but I’ve certainly been disappointed by the direction LinkedIn has taken and to some extent feel betrayed by the fact that they allow others to amass a huge network with much less effort by just paying a few extra bucks for a higher level membership. While I understand that LinkedIn has to turn a profit, they talk about not spamming people and connecting only to people you know, that is unless you want to pay LinkedIn for doing otherwise. I don’t want to come across as too negative though. I’m still a big fan of LinkedIn.