Having mutual friends doesn’t justify a connection

While I consider LinkedIn to be my favorite social network these days, it also tends to have the largest amount of spam. If you can filter out the spam requests the core feed is quite good, but the effort to filter out junk is slowly getting heavier all the time. Part of this is the fault of LinkedIn themselves, who promote paid features to help you spam more people more often.

For the side of spammers (or “cold marketers” if you want), finding excuses to reach out to new leads is an art that they continue to refine. Here are some I’ve received recently:

• I wanted to reach out and discuss the potential for a collaborative partnership.
• Hey Mickey, just saw your profile because of a mutual connection…
• Hey Mickey, I’m looking for mature marketing businesses…
• Hi Mickey, Are you open to use external partners for your software…
• Hey Mickey, I’m inspired to see your expertise in Digital Marketing…
• Hello Mickey , I came across your profile and was instantly drawn…

At the end of the day, you might think you have the greatest solution ever but that doesn’t justify cold outreach, mostly because everyone thinks they have the greatest solution. This leads to the old quote from Seth Godin says “how many times a day should we have to opt out, communicating with businesses we never asked to hear from in the first place?“.

Related is this quote from David Berkowitz:

I bristle at all of those LinkedIn requests that say, “I see we have ## connections in common. Let’s connect here too!” By that logic, you’d connect with everyone, and then it means you provide value to and get value from no one.

If you don’t have an existing connection with someone, cold outreach is simply unacceptable. The minute you say “sure, but in this case it’s ok”, you can multiply that by the other 100M marketers online and it’s chaos. As Seth said in his blog post this morning, don’t make the exception for your own spam.

If you have mutual friends with someone you’d like to connect to, great! Use those friends as a conduit to a warm introduction or an invite to a future event, rather than a thinly-veiled excuse to spam more people.