About this time a year ago I was helping my youngest son come up with ideas for his college admissions essay. One that fell onto the reject pile but got me thinking had to do with how surprisingly closely-connected we are to some very different people. I pointed out to him, for example, that he was only three steps removed from Mao Zedong and just one additional step from Stalin, two of the worst mass murderers in history. Also, Oprah.
The man connecting my now college freshman son to them and thousands more, by my way of seeing it, was Henry Kissinger. Through a bizarre set of events involving roaches and my search for cheap lodgings in Manhattan, I had dinner with him at a $1,000-a-plate gala while in graduate school 33 years ago (here’s the story if you’re interested).
But am I really “connected” with Kissinger? Certainly not well enough to call him Henry, or probably for him to have thought about me ever again. If I hadn’t been such a dummy then I might have followed up our serendipitous meal with a polite letter to him or the other bigwig at the table, John Whitehead, then chairman of Goldman Sachs, asking for an internship the following summer.
I wouldn’t have put high odds on receiving an affirmative reply and, if there had been one, it would have been written by a secretary, not either of them personally. Had social media existed then, sending them a connection request on LinkedIn would’ve been too much: The gulf between a pimply grad student in a $180 suit and a foreign policy legend or the head of a major investment bank was and is vast.
Today I’m neither just trying to get on the career ladder nor an establishment figure but in that giant area in-between, like most people reading this. If I meet for a cup of coffee with a student about their career, which I often do for those at Columbia or Brandeis, or as a favor to a friend, it wouldn’t be an act of chutzpah for them to send me a connection request on LinkedIn. That’s what a professional network is for. Other than becoming a resource and possibly helping impress some future employer of theirs, that’s usually the end of it and any career benefit is theirs, not mine.
Up until a few years ago, this was my one line use case for each major network:
Facebook: Cat videos, conspiracy theories, and remembering friends’ birthdays.
Twitter: Real time expert analysis, professional banter, sports, humor, and self-promotion.
LinkedIn: Facebook for unemployed people.
So Twitter was where I spent 99% of my social media time–a daily habit–and I’d go months without checking LinkedIn. When it came time to sign a book contract, agents and publishers would explicitly ask things like “do you have more than 10,000 followers on Twitter?” which I do–barely. And of course following people is often a one-way relationship. I’m a minor enough figure that I’d check every once-in-a-while who had followed me and, if it was a colleague or a prominent figure in finance (Bill Gross, Mohamed El-Erian, Howard Lindzon, and Anthony Scaramucci do), I’d naturally reciprocate, if I didn’t follow them already. And, if one is concerned about clout and not just hearing their pearls of wisdom, having those people think I was worthy of attention was a feather in my cap.
But that was back in the good-old days when Twitter frowned on white supremacy, rewarded me for being “notable” with a blue check, and was run by a malnourished but basically well-meaning Rasputin look alike. These days it is far less useful, not only for the advertisers that used to pay the bills but also for people like me. A blue check now means “I have eight dollars to subsidize the money-losing vanity project of one of the richest men in the world.” And, since clicks can be explicitly monetized, the most extreme and outrageous comments are rewarded and populate my feed, no matter how hard I try to banish them. After it became “X” I just left my account dormant for a while out of disgust. Now I check in periodically since competing businesses somehow haven't figured out how to replicate the town square aspect of Twitter and people still use it to contact me.
One silver lining is that this has led me to discover the charms of LinkedIn. I used to scoff at the cheesy self-promotion or occasionally cackle like a hyena in the newsroom at accounts that baited its overly-serious, virtue-signaling users (looking at you Jack Raines).
Now, though, I really appreciate it. First of all, it’s a place that understands the value of high quality news, actively curating articles on a topic instead of suppressing them through its algorithm. Second, it’s meant for business, so most things I write belong there and are of interest to at least a subset of people scrolling through their feed. I also have gotten better at finding actual items of interest amid the back-slapping posts. But third–and this might be the best feature–the engagement is real and comes from people who are who they claim to be and can’t look like an ass in public. Sure, some responses are disingenuous, but that’s miles better than @Ultrafrog17 responding to a post about the economy with some unhinged political rant or telling me my nose is big.
The more time I spend on LinkedIn, though, the more I get contacted by people seemingly out of the blue. I do have contacts who probably have no interest in what I do or post about–a neighbor who sells real estate, a friend’s wife who’s a teacher, a paper salesman I spoke to for a long time at a bar while on a business trip–but accepting those is just common courtesy. Then there are people like random engineers from Pakistan I definitely have never met. Dozens of people in law or finance whom I also don’t remotely recognize send me requests too.
LinkedIn isn’t Twitter. If you’re really just interested in hearing my brilliant thoughts or seeing what I publish, there are much better ways to do it, including subscribing to the WSJ and setting an alert or getting a free subscription to this Substack. But I don’t think the engineer from Pakistan wants to know the next time I write about “Real Tennis” or Warren Buffett. They are just complete strangers who want to be associated with me.
I did an informal survey of my WSJ colleagues about how to handle these (and by “survey,” I mean I stood up in the newsroom and solicited answers from everyone in earshot). The answers ranged from “I just approve every request” to the exact opposite.
I normally wouldn’t care about what other people do with their social media, but here’s the thing: When someone contacts me I almost always see that we have a mutual connection, and sometimes several. That makes it more likely that I’ll be afraid of offending the person by ignoring them. Maybe I should know them and take their professional accomplishments seriously?
Now this isn’t six degrees of separation, or even Makin’ Bacon’, the (now much-easier) game where you find the fewest steps between another actor and the Footloose/Apollo 13/Diner star Kevin Bacon. The connection of a connection doesn’t show up in their solicitation, though LinkedIn does highlight that elsewhere.
I normally just quietly ignore randos on LinkedIn, but recently I got a connection request that was so precocious that I had to say something. The person wanting to connect was a high school AI “entrepreneur” whose profile photo featured a power suit and tie. I never, ever reach out on social media to my sons’ friends. It would be fine if one of them reached out to me on LinkedIn as they’re all college or working age. Clearly this young man had been hard at work building out his adult connections, though, as we had four in common, including three pretty prominent colleagues at The Wall Street Journal.
I explained to him, politely, that I only use LinkedIn for professional connections. He wrote right back, feeling offended that I didn’t consider him a professional, which wasn’t what I said. So I replied again.
I’m impressed that he didn’t give up even then.
But this makes no sense. First of all, anyone can read what I write and can contact me without having to use a social network. There is also no way that Jacob, or anyone else, has the time or attention span to follow the posts of 30,000 people. I love meeting people but I find a few hundred overwhelming, and I’m in no way connected on a true personal level with many of them.
What is the outer limit? British anthropologist Robin Dunbar says the number of stable social relationships anyone can have tops out at about 150–now known as Dunbar’s Number–which is probably more than someone with family responsibilities can manage. I love his rule of thumb: “The number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”
I’m fine widening that definition quite a bit for social media purposes, and some of those virtual connections have turned into real ones–people I admired from afar whom I’d grab a beer with today. To name a few: My first book agent @literaryeric , the brilliant strategist and China expert @prchovanec , confidence expert and professor @peter_atwater , and investing supremo @howardlindzon ).
I don’t know enough about the economics of social media platforms to say whether people who have tens of thousands of meaningless connections are more or less useful to them than those who play hard-to-get. I’m guessing that I’m close to an ideal customer for LinkedIn–I subscribe to premium (through work) so Microsoft earns something on the $26 billion it paid to buy this network. My being judicious also means fewer annoying randos contacting my existing connections. I contribute quite a bit of (I hope) high quality content, including some long form posts. And if I engage with something then it’s meaningful, sincere, and does nothing to sully others’ experience (trolls are mercifully rare on LinkedIn).
Am I wrong? In the spirit of putting the “social” into social media, I’m curious how people reading this post handle and view connection requests. Please let me know–even if I don’t know you from a hole in the wall 😉.