The company where I work has instituted a policy forbidding current employees from recommending other current or former employees. The policy explicitly includes LinkedIn Recommendations under this policy.

Unhappily for me, I was not concerned with getting LinkedIn Recommendations for myself until recently, and thanks to this new policy, I’m not likely to get any from current co-workers.

I’ve begun looking at ways around this policy, besides asking former employers. For example, I’ve thought about doing projects for local non-profit organizations, and getting Recommendations based on such work.

Another idea I’ve had is to form a sort of tontine with other current co-workers, where we all write Recommendations for each other – and as soon as a member of the group leaves the company’s employ, he or she publishes the Recommendations he/she has written for the others.

Looking for other ideas, I found a reference to a new free ebook, How To Really Use LinkedIn. If you’d rather buy the paperback version, that’s available too.

I’ve just skimmed the book so far. I haven’t found any great revelation vis-a-vis getting around my employer’s policy on Recommendations.

However, I did pick up one tip on making new connections through existing connections. Instead of using LinkedIn’s standard “Get introduced through a connection” link, author Jan Vermeiren recommends emailing the shared connection directly, explaining your reason for wanting to make the connection, and making sure that your 1st-level connection knows the 2nd-level target well enough to introduce you. If your 1st-level friend is agreeable, he or she can write an email to the target, suggesting that the target send a connection request to you (which you’ll certainly accept – after all, that’s the point of the exercise!).

One year, one month, one day, one hour, and one minute ago, I wrote a post titled

10:10:10 on 10/10/10 – me, reloaded.

For 11:11:11 (PM, not AM) on 11/11/11, I thought I would revisit the reload, by reloading this site – that is, after over a year since my last post here, I’ve decided on a focus for this site.

When I first got the domain net edwardspurlock.net, it was a few weeks after my 30th high school reunion, and I decided to start a site to network with people I knew. That was the reason I got the .net TLD – that this would be my business and personal networking site.

Since then, I’ve drifted away from that purpose and used this more as a general-purpose personal blog, before abandoning it over the past year.

Since I am still interested in business and personal networking, and since this domain and its content has accumulated a good bit of “Google juice”, I’m intend to maintain the existing content, but use the site once more for its intended purpose – that is, focused on business and personal networking – but not just my own networking.

After several years of studying business networking, it occurs to me that I might have something to say to others on this subject. I plan to include reviews of business networking how-to books, articles on using LinkedIn and other networking sites, and essays on the philosophy of networking.

I also plan to use this as a repository for discussions and comments from Facebook – some of my friends there have wisdom worth sharing and remembering. More than once, I’ve thought to myself, “I wish Facebook had an easier way to find that comment again! That one’s golden!”

11:11:11 on 11/11/11 – I’m still here, and edwardspurlock.net is back.