Thanks for the 30-second warm glow, LinkedIn

I felt special for 30 seconds this morning, after LinkedIn sent me an e-mail that read:

Victoria, congratulations!

You have one of the top 5% most viewed LinkedIn profiles for 2012. LinkedIn now has 200 million members. Thanks for playing a unique part in our community!

Then I did the math and realized that 5 percent of LinkedIn’s 200 million registered users equals 10 million people—a number approximately the same size as the entire population of Sweden, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, or Tunisia.

Update on 13 February 2013:

This week it seems many LinkedIn users have posted generic notifications from LinkedIn similar to the one above. Mary Beth Smith, owner of the very active Market Your Printing Company and Girls Who Print discussion groups, even commented that she had to start deleting them to keep legitimate discussions from disappearing off the board.
http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=2946757&type=member&item=212988288&qid=e6f55abb-a3ea-42a9-b4d0-fad124a3ddf3&trk=group_most_popular-0-b-cmr&goback=%2Egmp_2946757%2Egde_2946757_member_212988288%2Egmp_2946757%2Eamf_2946757_13002312%2Egmp_2946757

I have to wonder why users are proving so cooperative at playing along with LinkedIn’s self-promotion scheme.  Is it because they’re delighted by the ease of regurgitating ready-made, host-approved content, even though in enlightened social-media practice going generic is the 9^th Deadly Sin?
http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/9-mistakes-youre-making-on-linkedin.html 

It’s also worth emphasizing that, although democracy is supposedly the underlying principle behind social media, in this instance LinkedIn has imposed a self-advertising monster from on high that will clutter the platform with redundant, user-unfriendly content for days or weeks to come.

 

Please share your experiences regarding mentors for women

It’s encouraging to see that my posting yesterday prompted a dribble of renewed activity on a LinkedIn discussion on female mentors that I launched in Oct 2010.  The platform is an interesting and fun group called Girls Who Print, moderated by Mary Beth Smith of Texas.  To bring you up to speed, I’ve quoted how I began the discussion below:

   

Wanted: Girl success stories

 Does anyone have career-advancement stories with female heroines to share? Or female survival tactics for the recession or glass ceilings?

I’ve just finished reading through all 268 interesting entries posted to Mary Beth’s “And you are… ??" discussion since she launched it in May 2009. Back then she wrote: “Who knew guys would accept an invite to something called “Girls Who Print”??!!

Similarly, it was no surprise to me when I first joined Girls Who Print that my female publisher, Sara Young, was already a member. But it also turns out that my (male) editor at PrintAction, Jon Robinson, is a closet feminist: when editing my [Sept 2010] column (see https://www.box.net/shared/15ln6t43jf), Jon didn't just tolerate my long account of how Ms. Kris Bovay rose through the ranks to become chair of BIA; he even agreed with me that female professionals need to read more of that kind of stuff. Kris has forged an impressive career, although both her family responsibilities and the recent recession required her to change course radically. I hope the widespread supporters of Girls Who Print will exploit this space to share other, uniquely female, path-to-success stories.

Journalist, Chris Matthews (a male whose beat is politics), wrote: “It’s hard getting somewhere without a map. It’s the same reason so many of us love biographies. They show us how others have gotten where we want to go. If you want to get somewhere, study the routes others have taken.”

That goes double for women. Practitioners and theorists agree that in order to succeed professional women need to form the same kind of mentoring relationships that have enabled their male counterparts to advance. But studies show that women in corporate settings have often found mentoring relationships with other women unsatisfying: senior women report feeling either unqualified, discounted, or overburdened as mentors, while junior women complain that senior women are unreceptive or competitive in dealing with them as protégés.

I’m betting that this forum could turn out to be the missing antidote.

To review or make subsequent contributions to this discussion, please refer to the following link:

http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=1969742&type=member&item=31566959&qid=846c47d6-8aab-428d-9304-1cbf6507f12d&trk=group_most_popular-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egdr_1319731197620_1%2Egmp_1969742%2Eamf_1969742_41605696%2Egmp_1969742

Here’s hoping not only that more conversation will ensue on line about the important topic of mentoring females, but also that it will somehow yield concrete practical benefits for professional women.