Monday, February 24, 2014

How To Not Invite the Entire District to Join you on LinkedIn.

Some people have been mentioning receiving multiple email invitations from fellow employees to join them on LinkdIn. There have been a lot of questions and concerns about these emails. When you receive an invitation to connect with someone via LinkedIn, please check to see who the invitation was sent to. 

If it was not sent directly to your email address, do not click the connection. 
There are two mistakes that can happen when creating a LinkedIn account.  Well, I suppose there are more, but these are the two most common for our district users. Read on as I explain how they happen and how to prevent them.





When creating a LinkedIn account, or updating your profile, the website often recommends ‘people you may know.’  Look twice at the screen and the items that are selected before clicking the Continue button.  It may have suggested hundreds of people and will have them selected by default. If you click continue it will invite them all.  It should give you a spot to click “Skip this step”.  If you would like to connect with some of the people it suggested, uncheck the Select All box and manually select the ones you choose.


Frequently, it also asks if you would like to connect to your email address book.  If you say yes, or if you have inadvertently connected it in the past, it may select all the contacts from your address book.  This can be a large number of people, for instance, every person in your address book, which could include parents and students. It should give you a spot to click “Skip this step”.  


The biggest problem with this second step is that you may have a lot of group email addresses in your contact list, such as watercooler@chipfalls.org or the building all_staff email addresses. It will send an invitation to all those groups.  This means if I am a member of several groups in your contact list, I will get several invitations.


If that is not frustrating enough, it gets even messier.  If I click through the invitation that was sent to one of the group messages, for example, an invite sent to Watercooler, it will try to log in to or create an account for that email address. That means if I click on an invitation that went to watercooler@chipfalls.org and don’t realize it, LinkedIn will think my email address is watercooler@chipfalls.org. As soon as people start connecting with this new account it will send updates to the group email address, which means all notices would be sent to everyone in the watercooler email group.


In summary, when setting up a LinkedIn account, please take your time and read each screen carefully before you click Continue.

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