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Comment by alain94040 | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn is great for sales people who need to know who to call at large companies. Say I want to reach a director of business development at Cisco. LinkedIn will tell me who to call. Amazing.

Where LinkedIn fails in my opnion (and why we work so hard on http://letslunch.com) is connecting people. When is the last time you "met" someone new on LinkedIn? Their introductions (what they call InMail) simply don't work: no one pays attention to them.

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When you've been in business for a couple of decades, it is a great way to track down people from the past. I'm constantly finding that the person I want to reach is only one or two steps removed from me. Much easier to contact people when you don't have to cold call.

Circumstances change and I'm constantly surprised by people whom I thought were not particularly ambitious end up in very influential positions.

At the end of the day, LinkedIn is just another tool, but a very powerful and useful one.

Do they, tho'? Or do they just claim to on the Internet?

A constant source of amusement for me is the recommendations, which are really just people getting their mates to praise them now references are supposed to come only from HR. People with more than say 5 recommendations, that are particularly gushing, you should probably conclude the opposite...

Uh. Having sent about 30 inMails in the last 10 days, I got about an 70% reply rate which is pretty darn good for cold contacts.

Most people I have cold emailed have not replied from inMail. I find people are more likely to respond when you email their work email directly. It feels more personal. You can usually figure it out using the name, than researching the companies email naming scheme. Most places are either Joe.Schmoe@xyz.com or Joe_Schmoe@xyz.com just do a google search for something like "jones@xyz.com" or some other common last name if it is a big company. This will usually help you figure out the email. Then just send the email to the address.. if you get the wrong joe schmoe 8/10 they are used to getting email for the other guy, so they just forward it along.

Well, inMails let you see who is sending you a message including who you know in common and for some reason, I must fit the profile of someone people want to reply to.

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