That may sound like an incantation from “Wicked”, but no, sadly, it isn’t. It’s yet another site to for me to practice my social network skills on. I had signed up for Plaxo a while back when it was simply a place to keep addresses updated. Then = simple, understandable purpose. Now, it’s trying to be LinkedIn or Facebook or who knows what. I tried to ignore it, but then I started getting connection requests coming in and I thought that I better check in (especially with someone named “Wiley” sent me a connection request.) I claim somewhere to be a master of all things social networking – how can Plaxo elude me the way Twitter has? I clicked on the link to accept all of these, and it took me to a screen where the notice “that connection request has already been handled” came up. Funny then that I cannot find these people in my connection list. Did they try and connect and suddenly decide, nah, Ellen’s not my Plaxo type? Did they fall into a Plaxo void? No idea.
I started with a whopping four connections (the usual Wiley suspects, my brother in law, and a friend from town.) All of a sudden, I have 5 connect requests in my mailbox. Why did Plaxo suddenly hit the radar screen for these folks? I sent a note to the person who requested the most recent connection, who said he inadvertently requested connection with all his LinkedIn contacts. That’s one way to build your network here, so I tried it and found a whopping 45 people on Plaxo connected to me already through LinkedIn. So I intentionally sent connections to them.
So….now I’m connected, what should I be doing next? This isn’t the most intuitive site. I see a “Pulse Stream” but so far only Jeff Pulver and Chris Webb have anything going in there. Any suggestions from people who might have a better masterly of Plaxo than I of what to do next? How to use this site for good, and not the evil that comes from time wasting?
