Cut The Crap Out Of Business Networks

I‘m tired of all the spam, so-called notifications, I’m receiving to my inbox day by day. I signed into LinkedIn after not using it for a couple of weeks and was overwhelmed with messages from IT recruiters, outsourcing companies, and, let’s not forget, SEO specialists wanting to do business with me. The only positive exception being a friend from school I haven’t heard of for ages …

All other mumbo-jumbo is stealing my time.

The typical message goes like this:
I am [first] [last name] for [company x], [insert service] company located in [city], [India|Pakistan|Roman…]. We specialize in [whatever you have displayed in your profile]. This e-mail is in regards to explore opportunities in outsourcing…
I do have a experienced team… We have resources for you …

Same same but different is XING that ups the ante even more by providing you with myriads of event invitation spam. Only recently I got a reminder to pay my subscription fee (€8/mth) for their premium features, i.e. actually knowing who visited your page and sending valuable e-mails. As you might have guessed I didn’t extend my subscriptions and am not missing anything.

I might have made mistakes at the beginning and am now correcting them one after the other.

How to fight business network spam
  • Use an alternate email address for your LinkedIn contacts
  • Don’t make your primary email address public
  • Unsubscribe from groups you are not really following
  • Reduce the email frequency of daily wrap-ups and newsletters
  • Don’t connect with everybody. Getting some connections is beneficial but keep quality over quantity. Most of the members bring ZERO value to the table

The notifications tab in Gmail is helping a little but the flood of notifcations must still be dealt with.

Photo Credit, detailed tutorial on how to avoid LinkedIn spam here.