Adam Jewell - Search & Affiliate Marketing

There is lots of hype in the social networking area on the Internet. Facebook is supposed to be valued at 15 Billion, MySpace got purchased for 500 Million a while back and now LinkedIn.com is supposed to be valued at a 1 billion. While all the values are probably questionable at best in this space, LinkedIn.com is actually a really useful site with meaningful interaction among members of the site facilitated by the unique Q&A section.

It was a few years ago that Bryan Eisenberg at FutureNow sent me an invite to join LinkedIn and since he’s a pretty smart guy and knows a thing or two about the Internet, I signed up for it. For the longest time, I didn’t do anything with it but then the site started to pick up some steam, people started to interact on it, the Q&A started to come alive and there was some engaging conversation taking place on the site. The profile for Adam Jewell is here and now when you search Yahoo! for Adam Jewell, they put the LinkedIn profile at the top of the page. I’m not sure if I like that or not but I guess it makes it easy to do research on people.

LinkedIn is probably a hotspot for recruiters and sales people. They’ll get your information and call you to try to sell you stuff or get you to take another job but my experience is that it has always been pretty mellow. You don’t get hounded and if you are not interested, they’ll probably stop calling you after a while. With LinkedIn, it makes one wonder how much you really need to deal with recruiters. Sure, some companies only take applicants from recruiters but others will go direct and LinkedIn makes it pretty easy to find people and look at their qualifications and what types of things they are interested in.

In any case, if you are going to participate in the social networking craze and put up some profiles here and there, there are two sites that I’ve found to provide some value so far. LinkedIn.com for professional networking and Meetup.com for real, live social networking.