Sunday, October 4, 2009

[itroundtable] FW: LinkedIn - an “invisible bug” when you send invitations by email address

 

From Patrick O'Malley.  He explains the bug in text and in a video.
 
 
 

Am I in your LinkedIn network?  If not, invite me.

Ann Bergquist

annber@hotmail.comhttp://www.linkedin.com/in/annbergquist


 

Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 10:03:58 +0000
Subject: Missing LinkedIn Tips for Sales, Jobs, Recruiting, HR, etc
From: patrick.omalley.g@gmail.com
To: annber@hotmail.com

Missing LinkedIn Tips for Sales, Jobs, Recruiting, HR, etc


LinkedIn – an "invisible bug" when you send invitations by email address

Posted: 01 Oct 2009 02:15 AM PDT

Summary:
LinkedIn has "invisible" bugs in the invitation process that may make you think you are sending a group of invitations when you really aren't.  Here's an example of one…
Details:
If you want, you can skip to the video below and see a 3 minute demo of this LinkedIn invitations bug, but here is a text explanation if you'd rather read about it.
If you want to invite 5-25 people to join your LinkedIn network, and you have a list of email addresses, you probably follow the instructions below:
  • Click Add Connections on the left of your home page
  • On the right, enter the email addresses
    • (Note: you can "Stretch" the email address area)
  • Change the personal invitation
  • See the green acknowledgement box at the top the confirms that emails were sent
  • Continue on your merry way, assuming that all of those people got an invitation
However,
  • you may have put the email addresses on separate lines
  • you may not have put a comma between each email address
    • (this is most likely if you get a list of emails from an excel spreadsheet)
  • you probably didn't compare the count of emails with the number of invitations that were actually sent
The insidious bug is that if any email address doesn't have a comma after it, LinkedIn ignores all of the ones after it, and doesn't tell you about it.  Not so merry now, are you?
At least now you know that you have to do a sanity check to make sure LinkedIn processed all of the email addresses that you gave to it.  I have seen similar behavior in other parts of LinkedIn, so be careful!
Here's a video that actually illustrates this.  It contains no explosions, supermodels, or inappropriate language, and no animals were harmed in the creation of the video.

Hope this helps.
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