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A Better Way to Ask for LinkedIn Recommendations

Here are two ways you can go about getting LinkedIn recommendations on your profile:

1) Ask everyone you know (or a decent-sized subset of them) to write one for you.

2) Recommend select people you know.

I’m amazed that most people I’ve encountered personally take door number one. It’s the easy route, it’s lazy, and it’s fishing for compliments. The requests are also almost always impersonal, even if they’re personalized with one’s name.

Yet with door number two, one comes off as generous, willing to take the time to do an unexpected favor for a connection. That connection won’t always reciprocate, and LinkedIn would know the stats, but much of the time if the two people truly know each other, then the connection will return the favor.

Writing ten recommendations to get five or even three in return is a lot harder, but it’s much better for relationship building.

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Comments to: A Better Way to Ask for LinkedIn Recommendations
  • Avatar
    July 14, 2008

    Good observations. Sound advice.

    Reply
  • Avatar
    July 14, 2008

    David, Excellent point and I must say that approach #2 has always worked better for me as well.

    Reply
  • Avatar
    July 14, 2008

    David,
    Funny… I was just thinking about this over the weekend. That I needed to give a few recommendations, so that I could get a few. This is an area of Social Marketing that I had totally glossed over. A few recommendations could probably kick start a few things.
    Great thoughts, as usual.
    Travis

    Reply

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