Social Network Experiment

I decided to embark on a social experiment yesterday. I created a fictitious person and a LinkedIn account, uploaded my address book and sent out a bunch of invitations. My interest is to determine how many people will accept the invitation to join the network of a person that does not exist solely on the basis of an invitation from someone who has their email address.

I don't know exactly how many invitations were delivered, but approx 470 could not because of, I am assuming, incorrect email contact information. Side note, it's fascinating to me that the most obvious issue at this point is how many contacts in my book are incorrect, yet the 2 companies that attempted to solve this problem, Plaxo and Good Contacts, never made the jump into social networking. It appears that there are 1184 outstanding invitations.

Here's the results from Day #1:
- 16 connections
- 500+ connections 2 degrees away
- 15,700+ connections 3 degrees away

I received 4 answers to my invitation indicating that I, or should I say my pseudonym, was not known well enough to accept my invitation. There was only 1 response from someone saying simply that they were not accepting new invitations.

One person responded that they wished to know more about the fictitious company I created. Another 'connection' actually sent me a business proposition and a request to connect through my network.

Finally, and most interesting, there were only 2 emails from people attempting to apply a qualitative filter to the invitation. The first was a personal email asking me to supply more information; I felt guilty about wasting their time, so I came clean. The second email was more blunt, a "do I know you?" email.

What does this prove? Well at this point, not much but I suspect over the next week the numbers will firm up. A key question that cannot be answered is how many invitations to join my network are not delivered because they are caught by spam filters, such as my email system, and how many are just ignored. Will keep you posted.

Comments

[Allan]

Facinating! Do keep us updated.

Of course, a certain number of the 1184 remaining people probably read your blog and are now clued in. This may affect the end result, but it is still a great experiment.

I read it as seven people refusing or qualifying the invitation (4+1+2) - is that right?

[Mark Frisk]

Great experiment!

It will be interesting to see whether your fictitious persona and business attract attention, and whether any of your direct, i.e. one degree, connections forward to you requests for contact from those two or more degrees away.

Accepting an invitation is one thing, agreeing to forward a request for contact to a person who doesn't exist is another.

[Guy Brighton]

I want to be your linked in friend too! Let's create a community of fake networking contacts!