For many, LinkedIn is a place to keep tabs with your workmates and business connections. Ahh, but it is so much more and I wonder how many of us use it more extensively.
Here is one simple example, Answers. LinkedIn is social. You can either add a question, select your own contacts to pose it to and/or open it up to the broader LinkedIn community (highly recommended for open topics) and let it fly.
My example:
At 10pm last evening I posted a question "What scares you about social media?". At 8am this morning there were five answers, 4 from people I had not met yet. Each provided some great insight and further discussion.
Take a look - What scares you about social media?
Here is a suggestion for LinkedIn - open up the dialog to be two way. My only gripe is that I cannot reply in the open to the respondents for others to see and participate in the dialog. I can reply directly to them, which is still a nice feature.
My reason to mention this about LinkedIn is to demonstrate that it has some really useful tools beyond being a little black book of colleagues. Try it out again. Join a group and jump in.
