Someone sent you this terrific LinkedIn message – and you responded in great detail to this wonderful opportunity, but it’s gone nowhere – why?
Later on you met up with them in-person at a networking event and asked about it, but they denied ever seeing anything from you in response and moved on.
How frustrating is that!
The answer is all in the little details and how you tried to use the system – and I’ll show you…
Messages from LinkedIn
The beginning of the answer is noticing how LinkedIn sends you email.
Every so often you’ll get short messages from LinkedIn letting you know what’s been happening. The email subjects are something like “LinkedIn Messages” or “LinkedIn Network Updates“. The emails come from “LinkedIn Communication <communication@linkedin.com>” or “LinkedIn Updates <updates@linkedin.com>”.
This is all normal and you’d never expect an answer if you replied to those messages, right?
Messages from other individuals on LinkedIn
So what happens when a LinkedIn user sends you a message – either a request to connect, an InMail, or a group message?
It comes from:
“John Smith (LinkedIn Messages) <messages-noreply@linkedin.com>”.
Now that’s interesting isn’t it…
You’ve received it in your email system (because LinkedIn wanted you to know about it right away), and the name that you see is an individual’s name. But the address at the end – that’s nobody’s: messages-noreply@linkedin.com
If you happen to hit the “reply” button on your email client, you will compose a wonderful message – and send it into a black hole.
Let me repeat that for effect – if you reply to this note through email, your message will never be seen again.
How to respond
If you’d like to reply to that message, you MUST login to the LinkedIn site, view the message there, and use LinkedIn’s reply button.
Protecting everybody
You might say that this is an odd behavior, but it really is in line with the LinkedIn way – just because the system allows you to send messages to each other doesn’t mean that everyone has given permission to send their email address to everyone else.
If you want your email address known, you’ve got to include it in your message.
(And yes, I’ve also talked about taking a conversation to email because the LinkedIn message system is not what everyone expects;-)
By the way…
You know you have complete control over the messages from LinkedIn, right? It’s there under the “Account & Settings” tab . If you’re getting messages and you want to change the frequency – do it there. And if you want your messages to go to another email account, you change it in there. (And follow the advice in this post to add email addresses to your LinkedIn account and set a new one as primary;-)
To your continued success, steve — Steven Tylock http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock