Ceci n’est pas un blog

a) They don’t work well and b) we can’t live without them.

Last night I posted the following question to my Linkedin network:

Why won’t linkedin let me add connections? And why won’t they answer my pleas for help? Just because I’m a non-premium member?

I started getting responses within minutes. Less than 24 hours later, I have 39. I joked to someone today that I would have felt lucky to get that many responses that fast to a note saying I had had a baby or gotten married. Sure there were several “I don’t think you meant to send this to me” responses, but most also had a hello or some other personal note. Many were sympathetic. A couple had real information about what probably caused the problem: having an invitation refused by someone saying they didn’t know me. The one person who ever did that to me was someone with the same first and last name as an old friend of mine, mistaken identity, why shouldn’t he click “I don’t know this person?” I sent him email today and he very generously wrote back quickly and tried to help, but there seemed to be no way to reverse the “black mark.”

So wow it’s so cool I have so many friends ready to leap to my assistance. But I still am blocked by the system from adding any more, which is kinda part of the point of the network.

I had dug up the name of someone on our contact list as “CEO and founder” of Linkedin and was about to send him an email when I got a note from the current CEO (the other has a new title)! Someone in my network apparently knows him and sent him my query. Now that is cool. Thanks to him I did finally get a human answer to one of my multiple tech support tickets.

I’ve sent a screenshot as requested. Now crossing my fingers, will report back.