Time for real friends, not grinning passport pictures

I got a congratulatory message from Linkedin that said my profile was among the top 10 per cent most viewed on the social networking site.

I immediately shouted out the news in my living room and said: “Hey, you are now speaking to the most connected person on the planet.” My son replied tersely that it was not such a big deal. “It’s just a PR gimmick,” he said.

My wife walked in with her mobile phone and said that she too got a message, saying she was among the top five per cent of Linkedin users in the Middle East. “You are just a user, while people are reading my profile across the globe,” I retorted.

“Dad, do your math,” said my son, but I didn’t understand what he meant. I gloated about my new celebrity status on Linkedin and Twitter, telling my 600-plus connections that I am now flying high in the stratosphere above them.

Then I realised that Linkedin has 200 million users world-wide and 10 per cent of that ... well, all I could say was it made me feel like a very small fish in a very large pond.

As you know, Linkedin is a huge network of professionals and it’s supposed to be helpful knowing someone, especially when looking for a job or a business opportunity.

Experts say that it is important to get a foot into the door of any organisation through an acquaintance, rather than blindly sending off hundreds of resumes. However, I have never really heard of anyone landing a job through connections from this site and there have only been anecdotal mentions.

I got on to this social networking site to connect with health professionals in cities such as Geneva or Paris and to try to find someone important in the gigantic pharmaceutical industry as my interest is in health issues.

A few months on the site and I found that being in Dubai was seen as a big plus-point for job-seekers elsewhere. I started getting messages asking me for advice on how to land a job in my paper. Then I started getting requests from people to fill in a survey about their job skills.

Finally, PR persons found me and I got invited to events such as an art exhibition and health events where I could get rid of my fat, to a beverage-tasting evening.

Meanwhile, Linkedin kept feeding my ego. “You have shown up in search results 20 times in the past seven days,” said one message. “Your profile has been viewed by five people in the past three days,” said another. If I wanted to see who were these mysterious people stalking me, I had to upgrade my account, and that of course, meant shelling out money.

Then Linkedin started something similar to the ‘Like’ button in Facebook. This was called ‘endorsing’ and when colleagues and connections recognised your skills, it was supposed to increase your chance of being discovered by head-hunters.

I started getting endorsed by complete strangers and initially I was full of myself, then I realised that there’s no such thing as a free lunch and I had to endorse their skills in return. I did that by ticking off a box and that person was now a genius in his field.

When I found that my connections link me to 11 million professionals, I decided that it was time to show off. “Read my story in Gulf News,” I told my connections and gave them the link, but I am not sure how many people even bothered to read what I wrote.

I find all this social networking is exhausting and ‘selling myself’ seems to be a 24-hour job. I think I should go out and make some new friends who are not just grinning passport pictures.