I have been debating the merits of becoming a LION and have finally decided to take the plunge. No I am not referring to the lion from national geographic below?
I am becoming a LION on LinkedIn. It means LinkedIn Open Networker.
By adding LION to my name I am letting the world know that I am going to let anyone and everyone into my network. Yup total strangers. The main advantage of doing this is that I will grow my network rapidly.
History of the LION
Back in 2006 Christian Mayaud and John L. Evans rapidly established the LIONs group on Yahoo. Below is the LIONs badge on Yahoo.
John applied to LinkedIn for a Badge of recognition and invented the LION concept in members names. This made it easy for other LIONS to find them. LinkedIn did finally gave this a go unoficially.
LIONs™ Badge as carried by LIONs™ on LinkedIn Given LinkedIn’s move to monetize their social network I can see this as being a bit of an issue.
Christian Mayaud has used this to suceeed in his business ventures. He liked LinkedIn as he never forgot a face however not remember the connection. Being part of the VC community and participating on LinkedIn sparked the whole interest from other people and recruiters.
Becoming a LION could affect your LinkedIn SEO and makes it somewhat confusing. I will give this a go and report on this at a later date.
I always wondered what LION meant!
Let me know how it goes. I sometimes accept people I don’t know, but I’ve sort of stopped because I find the connection updates and all the homepage info more interesting when it’s just people I know. I’d be interested in what value you get out of it though.
I am excited about this as well and will share the results of this experiment. I have heard some real success stories and some not so successful.
Stay tuned.