As a self-employed Information Architect working on my MLIS, it’s important for me to learn and make connections by meeting people in my (or related) industries. After years of struggling with making the right connections - including a lot of time spent at networking events in vain - I finally hit upon an incredibly useful technique.
LinkedIn is a great resource to reconnect to people I meet and ask for introductions. This idea took me about six years to figure out. Since I’ve always struggled with how to market my services – “information architecture” and “information architect” aren’t phrases that everyone understands and when they do, they usually don’t find it relevant – I thought I might save you some pain and misery and share the idea.
My overall goal with using LinkedIn was to find people to do informational interviews with. Before LinkedIn implemented its Companies feature, I used to look through the profiles of my connections to see who they knew. But this was quite random and took a long time, and resulted in a list of “blah”. I was never excited about it as I didn’t feel that my list was truly targeted.
