Automating Serendipity via LinkedIn: Quantifying Social Media Efficiency

A few weeks back I sent out a question to my LinkedIn network asking if people found value in Facebook and/or LinkedIn and inviting them to join my Facebook network. The answers were really interesting and I made some new Facebook friends (see below), but I found a little gem in them that proved LinkedIn can be more efficient than serendipity (the occurrence of accidental fortune, not the open source blog system). One of my contacts helped her husband find his job through a LinkedIn contact, thereby demonstrating the potential for huge networking efficiencies that this service and other social media have to offer. Who would have thought we could ever have automated serendipity to achieve tangible business value?

Here’s the anecdote: My friend’s husband had sent in a resume for a job and waited two weeks. Nothing. So she got on LinkedIn and found someone in her network who knew the CTO of the company. She asked her friend for an introduction to the CTO. Her contact was happy to make the introduction to the CTO, who checked to find out the HR department had no record of the resume. Her husband submitted his resume through the CTO, got an interview and was hired.

This happy sequence of events could just as easily taken place through a serendipitous meeting at a business lunch or happy hour, except that it didn’t. And that’s what’s intriguing.

The serendipity of the happy hour was essentially “automated” via the wife’s LinkedIn search, making LinkedIn serendipity’s not-so-little helper. And, according to my analysis, if her husband’s new job was truly meant to be – the fates bound and determined to help him get it through LinkedIn or through a happenstance social encounter - the LinkedIn approach could still be as much as one day and 13 minutes more efficient. See my analysis below. :-)

Okay. So LinkedIn is a good job hunting resource, what’s the larger implication for this? The larger implication is that while networking is a staple in the business world (many successful professionals, myself included, claiming it as THE most important business practice for landing new business or pulling a rabbit out of a hat for a client) social media and networking tools can take some of the chance elements out of leveraging the magic of networking to gain a business advantage – namely you don’t have to go to a thousand happy hours to find that serendipitous contact. When you can take the “High probability of Never” factor out of serendipity, a motivated job seeker, recruiter, salesperson, bizdev exec, negotiator or problem solver of any kind can use LinkedIn to produce cold hard cash for their business. Of course it takes initiative and a little bit of luck that your LinkedIn network is going to be responsive, but there has to be something left for the fates to mess with!

Besides, there’s another advantage (many of the geeks out there really love this part); think of all the money you’ll save on drinks! Using social media more effectively, you don’t even have to go to networking events to make serendipity work more efficiently for you. (Note to geeks: Remember, you do have to do something to get those people in your network in the first place.)

Sidenote: When I sent out my question, I got back a solid number of replies (about a 35% response rate and they’re still dribbling in – thanks to everyone who answered!). The majority of the replies went something like this: “I use LinkedIn when I need to find someone for BizDev or to help other people, but I don’t really know much about Facebook.” I also got a few responses that indicated LinkedIn was valuable for in job hunting. This is not surprising since LinkedIn makes money promoting job openings and the ability to get networked references on candidates using LinkedIn networking features. The irony in this was that everyone on my list who said they’d used it for hiring was being hired, and turned those networking features to their own advantage by checking out prospective bosses. (Note: Guy Kawasaki recommended this approach on his blog in January along with 9 other neat ways to use LinkedIn.) This is just another example of social media leveling the playing field, in this case between employees and employers.