Blazek was over the line, but there is a point to be made about LinkedIn etiquette

A two-part moral for the day: in a digital age, never put in writing anything that you don't want uploaded to the internet and get to know the etiquette of the social media platforms that you're using.

These are lessons learned in no uncertain terms by Kelly Blazek, the co-founder of the Cleveland Job Bank, an organisation set up to help job-hunters in the US city.

Last month, Blazek was contacted by twentysomething university graduate Diana Mekota, who had just relocated to the city and was seeking employment.

Having made an initial contact with the Job Bank, Mekota followed up by requesting a connection to Blazek on professional social network LinkedIn.  She received the following response:

Image via Imgur

While this is stunningly rude and overly aggressive, if you can slice your way through the rhetoric, Blazek makes a point; why should strangers expect to connect to your networks on LinkedIn?

Unlike other social network which require no real effort to build personal connections, LinkedIn is a professional platform and it takes time and effort to properly cultivate a robust, useful network of connections.

Once you have accepted on LinkedIn, they can view and contact your connections, creating the digital equivalent of photocopying your contacts book (kids, ask your parents).

Many LinkedIn users will have spent considerable time building their digital networks through real-world interactions, attending seminars, conferences and networking events and eating innumerable canapes.

Contacting strangers on LinkedIn is frowned upon, specifically because it enables them to mine your contacts without having done any legwork.  Worse still, they could sour relationships with both long-standing and freshly minted business contacts by dropping your name into their (potentially unwelcome) introduction.

If I receive a request from someone that I don't know, I send them back a short, polite request to remind me of how and when we met. Unsurprisingly, many of them fade into the online ether, never to be heard from again.

However, there is also a balance to be struck: if you completely shut yourself off from the prospect of engaging and connecting with strangers, then you might just miss that key opportunity to bring new business into your organisation, or miss the perfect job opportunity being offered by a recruiter.

As an addendum it should be noted that Blazek's pugnacious and surly response forced her to make a public apology, close her Twitter account and delete her blog posts as well as hand back her Communicator of the Year award, details of which can be found here.