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: Lindedin's tagline “relationships matter,” sums up a fundamental primordial need of human beings to connect with other people. And, in this increasingly interconnected and always-on virtual world that needs to connect and create relationship for business and professional reasons, it is just a couple of clicks away. While there are other social and professional networking sites, it appears that LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) is increasingly relevant for professional networking among Indians and the global Indian community. I think this is especially true in India where which source or what connections you have goes a long way in the business and professional world. However in the virtual world you can bypass the gatekeeper of that connection or source by tapping into the LinkedIn network and figuring how you can reach them.

Often described as a combination of personal and professional rolodex, LinkedIn is at its basic level a free service where you can create your professional profile and search and reconnect with people that you might have lost touch with. LinkedIn lets you leverage your networks and contacts to achieve your business goals. For instance, Karthik Balakrishnan, vice-president of Jina Ventures, a private equity firm located in New York says, “LinkedIn has been helpful in sourcing deals by reaching out via LinkedIn to new India private equity funds and advisory firms.” Karthik finds LinkedIn useful to connect with people from his industry since many of them are members of this business networking site. “LinkedIn has brought the world to my doorstep,” points out Sachadev Ramakrishna, VP, strategic marketing, in a leading global technology company. He adds, “LinkedIn proves Metcalfe’s Law right, which demonstrates the power of networks. Every node added to the network leads to an exponential degree of usefulness and connections.” Robert Metcalfe, the man behind the law, is often described as the ‘father of the ethernet’ and was the founder of 3Com, one of the early networking companies founded in Silicon Valley.

How fast is LinkedIn growing? Consider this: in early 2007, LinkedIn had about 9 million users and today it has over 17 million users around the world and those numbers keep growing. If you do the math, it looks like LinkedIn is probably adding about a million users a month. Another way of looking at the phenomenal growth of LinkedIn is through the number of page hits it gets on its website. According to Wikipedia, LinkedIn gets about 3.2 million users per month and that translates into a compound annual growth rate of 485% as of December 2007. So clearly, LinkedIn is doing something right and has tapped into people’s need to connect and network at a professional level.

Karthik and Sachadev are just two among the thousands of LinkedIn members from the global Indian community. The growing popularity and influence of LinkedIn is further evident among Indians through LinkedIn Google Groups, LinkedInIndia forum. Uber networker Udhay Shankar of Bangalore says, “The key thing about LinkedIn is that it enables you to see other people’s networks, in a business-oriented way. Their entire feature set is tweaked for business use. An example of what I mean is the ability to seek references about a potential hire — or the ability to get recommendations from your network, which is then further qualified by “How do you know this person?”, “Would you work with him/her again?” etc. A LinkedIn profile can serve as a resume as ‘Resume 2.0’, if you will, though I dislike that term.”

Success is not often lonely. LinkedIn has seen competition from other professional networking sites such as Plaxo and many other wannabes, although the ‘network effect’ being what it is, it is hard for just about anyone to try and catch up. Nevertheless, competition always has a habit of rearing its head when you least expect it. For instance, look at the number of new college grads who are listing their Facebook URLS and ‘fan following’ on their resume’s. Can professional networking on social sites be that far off? My guess is that day is not too far away when you get to read about your supervisor’s taste in music just as much as they get to see the company you keep. After all, the best kept secret is the one known to all!