Communicating with Your Connections – Spam or Networking?

I’m writing this post because yesterday I read an interesting post from Scott Allen at the linkedintelligence blog.  I think he puts a very important topic on the line (you should read his thoughts about spamming or networking). There are some other people opinions from people like Jason Alba or Kai Roer that can be discussed for a long time.

 

They cover an important issue about how to communicate with lot of people of our networks and when that communication becomes spam. I think to add my connections to a newsletter won’t be the right way to get to them but I also can imagine that there are lot of people that don’t have time at all to write and answer to each and every connection about what they are doing.

 

Here there are my two cents about this.

 

Kai Roer wrote “when I accept or invite a connecting, there is nothing in that acceptance that says it is ok for the connection to send me a weekly newsletter. Some people seems to be using LinkedIn as a newsletter subscription service – and I do not approve of that kind of behavior.”.  I think he is certainly right but we can do some exceptions. Why? Just as an example there are people that never communicate with us and only send newsletters… I guess we don’t want just to have a connection with them by a periodical newsletter.

 But maybe we can accept those “newsletter” from people that we talk to them, or people that we want to know about them because we can do some business with them or we can help them or be helped by them, or just because we know they don’t have time to write us and a newsletter is a kind of update for us.

 

I hate newsletters but I must admit that this is the only way maybe we can know what some very busy people is doing and what’s happening in their lives.

 

I hate newsletters and I must admit that I almost don’t read them when I receive one but I do read lot of “kind of newsletter” of busy people, of interesting people that, even though I know they are not writing specifically to me, I want to know what they think or say.

 

 By the way, I take those readings like when I read Scott Allen blog. I read his book “the Virtual Handshake” and I read his blog and if he any time send me a “some kind of newsletter” email I will read it anyway because I guess there are two things here:

1) I guess he is really busy and as he don’t know me at all (or too much for any other cases) I’m not the one he will spend some time with

2) I consider him an interesting man because what he writes is interesting so I read what he writes.

 

I think these two conditions must occur to get positive things like read that kind of newsletter and get a response for it.

 

What I’m trying to say? Well, if some man I’m connected with just send a newsletter to his many connections, and I don’t consider him too interesting maybe his newsletter won’t be read it or maybe that newsletter will stay in the inbox until I have time to read it. I think that kind of newsletter become some time like a blog we read, we read it when we have time to do it and we answer them when we have not only have time but also something interesting to say about it.