Are you building the value of LinkedIn’s business, or your own?

Since I first joined LinkedIn I had three goals for visitors to my profile:

• I want them to see how I got to here, on a long and winding career path that goes to some surprising places;
• I want them to see what I’m thinking about and working on right now; and
• I wanted them to see, by who I’m connected to on LinkedIn, what my actual real-world network looks like – the people who I think I know well enough to be able to recommend to others for a specific purpose or reason.

Judging by the number of random strangers who ask to connect to me on LinkedIn, my list is different to yours in one fundamental respect – most of you seem to be seeking to connect to every random stranger LinkedIn’s algorithms suggest to you.

I ask you to reconsider that approach.

You know that internet adage, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product”? Apparently it was first posted in 2010 on this Metafilter post by Andrew Lewis.

If anything, it’s more true today than it was in 2010 since there are now many reported instances in which the data created by our use of a free internet product has been sold.