Can I buy you a beer? (LinkedIn Experiment)

Cool experiment. I get a few LinkedIn contacts (maybe 10 a week) and sadly I've fallen into a bad practice of ignoring some. The majority of the ones I ignore are those that try and establish whether or not I have time to discuss something. I much prefer direct blunt contact that asks one or maybe two direct questions - maybe even as the subject line of the contact. I need to be able to stop what I'm doing and respond right then or it's going to get old and I'll shift to ignore mode.

I cringe when I think back on emails I sent in to people to consider partnerships or funding of a past venture.. I usually included every possible point and counterpoint I could, as though I had this one shot at getting their interest and then it would be gone.

Not to say this is very likely to lead to a meeting or lunch in my case (lunch is often my only flex time in day). Is it possible that your objective itself is unnecessary?

For me, it's necessary for someone to have something specific in mind. I'll always think I'm too busy to just chat with someone I've never met, but if they have a specific subject in mind and can tie some reason why I'm a good person to talk about that, it's much more likely to pique my interest.

It's related, oddly, to some hitchhiking I did almost 20 years back. I found it worked much better to have a sign with a place name than to just stick out your thumb, even if I didn't have a particular place I needed to get. (In this case, I think it actually hits the safety aspect - it seems less dangerous to pick someone up who has a destination in mind than to pick someone up whose sole goal seems to be to get picked up.)

Related, this is an old New York Times article, but likely even more true now than then:

So I decided to have a Facebook party. I used Facebook to create an “event” and invite my digital chums. Some of them, of course, didn’t live in Toronto, but I figured, it’s summer and people travel. You never know who might be in town. If they lived in Buffalo or Vancouver, they could just click “not attending,” and that would be that. Facebook gives people the option of R.S.V.P.’ing in three categories — “attending,” “maybe attending” and “not attending.”

After a week the responses stopped coming in and were ready to be tabulated. Fifteen people said they were attending, and 60 said maybe. A few hundred said not, and the rest just ignored the invitation altogether. I figured that about 20 people would show up. That sounded pretty good to me. Twenty potential new friends.

On the evening in question I took a shower. I shaved. I splashed on my tingly man perfume. I put on new pants and a favorite shirt. Brimming with optimism, I headed over to the neighborhood watering hole and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Eventually, one person showed up.

I wonder how many people you could actually get to join you for a beer.

@dave it didn't work for this guy b/c he didn't spend time with each individual person. It was a mass invite. It's key to tie it back to each person's interests as you previously said.

@barnabee

I came in here because I thought there would be beer.

@dave, Interesting - your destination safety indicator is still very much the reason I prefer the defined question indicator. (only instead of getting stabbed or shot to death in a quick painless manner, there is the very real chance of exposure to something boring for many minutes of time.)

I'll accept your free beer, but you can only talk to me for the length of time it takes me to finish the beer. If I shotgun it in the first 30 seconds, I was bored to death listening to you.

@mediacre, But...I...talk...reeaaal...sloooow.