Nothing But Your Name
It has become a fairly common practice, primarily among “open linkers”, it seems, to put all kinds of stuff in the name field of their LinkedIn profiles, including:
- E-mail addresses (intended to bypass LinkedIn’s requirement of knowing it in order to connect)
- LION (intended to indicate the person is a Linked In Open Networker and generally receptive to invitations from people they don’t know) [be sure to read my comment below about the compromise solution reached between the LIONs group and LinkedIn]
- Connection counts (intended to impress people, I suppose — the implication being that having more connections somehow makes one more worthwhile to connect to)
- Various punctuation marks (intended, presumably, to affect sort order, or perhaps make the name stand out more in search results — the sort order is a non-issue, since LinkedIn doesn’t display search results alphabetically)
A friend of mine sent me one the other day that has to be by far the most egregious case of this I’ve yet seen (I don’t have the heart to out this guy completely, but if you come across it, you’ll know it):
I want to rant, I really do, but I won’t (here’s why) — I’ll just let you draw your own conclusions. My humble opinion is that this practice is turning what’s supposed to be a professional networking site into a virtual Las Vegas strip. It’s kind of like walking into a networking meeting wearing a sandwich board:
Moreover, LinkedIn’s User Agreement specifically prohibits it:
I’ve long wondered why LinkedIn doesn’t just implement some very simple code to catch some of that. It’s very easy to pick out e-mail addresses with regular expressions, and there are only a few valid punctuation symbols that people can use in their name.
For the moment, though, it seems LinkedIn may finally be starting to do something about it the old-fashioned way. One person announced on MLPF today that:
LinkedIn asked me to delete the “3100+” [their connection count] and put only the surname.
It’s about time. You know… if LinkedIn decided they wanted to allow it (doubtful), I wouldn’t like it, but I’d live with it. But so long as it’s in the user agreement, it should be enforced, and consistently.
So if you’re one of those with extra stuff in your name, please remove it. Do it now before LinkedIn simply forces is it on you. I promise you, it will actually enhance your image, not hurt it.
July 12th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
Scott, this enforcement is something I’ve seen 3 times in the last month now! It’s interesting … I think there will be a “battle” between users (since this is SOOO common, and LinkedIn, to see if they really want to push this issue.
Jason Alba
CEO - JibberJobber.com
:: self-serve career management ::
July 13th, 2007 at 8:10 am
Actually, reading John Evans’ post on MLPF this morning, it appears the LIONS may have met a compromise solution with LinkedIn.
One of the points I should have made in the original post is that the *one* of those four things that I could see a valid argument for including is the “[LION]“. Why? Because it allows open networkers to identify each other. I certainly think it’s reasonable for them to do so, because it allows them to easily connect and — presumably — to not send unwanted invitations to people they don’t know who don’t have that indication.
So what’s the compromise solution?
1. LinkedIn has now allowed LIONS to be an official LinkedIn group with a blue lion badge, so LIONS members will be able to easily identify other LIONS when viewing their page.
2. The LIONS have agreed to take their names and the [LION] designation out of the name field and put it in the headline field instead. This makes it still viewable in search results, but takes it out of the hyperlink and takes it out of a field that is supposed to be for the name only and puts it into a field that is intended to be freeform.
I think this is a great compromise — puts it all within LinkedIn’s User Agreement and still allows the open networkers to identify each other easily.
BTW, as of this writing, the badge isn’t available yet, and neither of the couple of LION organizers I know have implemented this yet, but it’s supposed to happen.
July 15th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Linkedin needs to come up with a way to include nicknames if they are going to be screening out punctuation. Maybe noone needs to see Charles (Chuck) Jones in the name field, but some of us have nicknames that aren’t obvious or well known variants.
July 15th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
Great article. I agree with you 100%.
July 24th, 2007 at 12:16 am
And it seems that “compromise” may have been a little more one-sided than it was presented. Word is that customer services is telling people the e-mail can’t be in the headline field either.