I had worked with Joe years ago and always assumed he generally liked me, so you can imagine how I felt when I sent him my friend request, only to receive no response.
I could see his friends list, and on it were other mutual friends. He had friended them, so why not me?
Perhaps he didn’t really like me as much as I had assumed. Might this be his way of telling me? Well then, maybe I didn’t like him so much either, I reckoned.
But what if he wasn’t well? Surely if he were well, he would have friended me. Maybe there was a death in his family. Or perhaps he was just busy?
I couldn’t know. At least he could have updated his status message.
I was left feeling confused, and maybe a little bit slighted. Joe was very popular, and if he didn’t want to friend me, maybe I wasn’t worthy. But who was he to judge me?
I wondered if I should reach out to Joe. I sent him a message, but he didn’t reply.
My friend AW had a similarly perplexing online networking experience. At an alumni reunion for the blue-chip consulting firm where she once had worked, an ex-colleague confronted her.
“What’s the deal with you on LinkedIn?” he challenged her. “Why are you hiding your contact list? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?”
AW was perplexed. Was she obligated to open her contact list to anyone who might like to troll it looking for leads? Wasn’t it reasonable for her to keep her contact list private? This bloke didn’t think so. In his mind, AW wasn’t playing by the business-networking rulebook, and he was offended.
I’ve apparently offended people too. I was once approached by a business acquaintance who requested that I write a personal recommendation that could be added to his LinkedIn profile.
The problem was that I had never worked with the guy. I think we had met a few times when I was at Excite Europe. On this basis, he wanted my personal recommendation.
If meeting me is all it takes to get my personal recommendation, that’s a pretty low standard. I told him why I was uncomfortable with his request, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He actually tried to convince me that we had indeed worked together – although the best he could manage was to throw around the name of some mutual acquaintance.
We went back and forth on this for several days, as though his persistence would be enough to force me to admit to some sort of repressed memory of our having worked together. It was a bit like the satanic child-molestation cases of the 1980s, when entire communities became convinced, in spite of the lack of evidence, that nursery school teachers were ritually abusing their children.
This guy was the Mrs. David Letterman of business networking, always lurking around every corner. I was connected to everyone in the world through him. He was a social networking whore. Being linked through him was useless, since everyone else was too. With him, it was quantity, not quality. Every new contact was another notch in his belt.
After our bizarre debate over whether or not we actually had worked together, I finally got disgusted enough to drop my would-be colleague from my contact list – the only time I’ve ever done that. Checking his profile, he already had hundreds of personal recommendations anyway – so either my memory is really faulty or lots of other people are as indiscriminate as him. With hundreds of recommendations already, why did he work so hard to wring one more out of me?
Not long ago I saw this same person quoted in the newspaper, boasting about how he actually had hired people to manage his online networking presence – apparently too vast to handle by himself. Which leads me to wonder – had I even been arguing with him at all, or just with one of his paid impersonators? I guess I’ll never know.
Back to Joe. About a week ago, he finally friended me, along with about 150 other people. “Sorry,” he said meekly. “I had so many friend requests I was overwhelmed, so I just sat on them.”
Joe had suffered from social networking paralysis. But all that mattered to me was that he had clicked a link and thus validated me as his friend.
It’s true that in the old days it was never necessary to validate friends electronically. But I didn’t care. I felt like Sally Field clutching her Oscar: “He likes me,” I told myself. “He really, really likes me.”
