The Early Bird Gets the Worm

Over the weekend, I decided to try to fill out my LinkedIn network a bit by sending out invitations to contacts who might be interested. I sent out about 100 invitations, mostly to friends and colleagues who were not yet registered LinkedIn users. I was pleasantly surprised at the response–nearly 50% have accepted so far–and I was reminded of a couple of interesting facts in the process.

1. Branding is everything.

Think about how difficult it would be to get 50 out of 100 people to join any online community. Ignoring invites to random services and communities is a daily occurrence for most people who spend a lot of time online. It took me until late last year to finally join MySpace, and I only did so after hearing the name 60 gazillion times. My utterly irresistible charm notwithstanding, my invitees joined LinkedIn largely because they had read or heard its name discussed favorably enough times that they had already made an internal decision that they’d sign up if the opportunity presented itself. I just happened to be that opportunity for them.

2. The Early Bird Gets the Worm

Another interesting tidbit was that a large percentage of my most productive and efficient contacts accepted before 6am in their respective time zones. That’s right, imagine being finished with your daily correspondence before eating breakfast everyday; or even just imagine waking up early enough to eat breakfast everyday:-) People who want to get things done with a fresh mind and no distractions wake up early. Plain and simple. Unless of course you’re a freak like me, in which case you stay up all night and sleep through the morning.

I’m thinking that the early risers are definitely on to something. If I could just manage setting my sleeping habits as well as I do with the VCR timer I’d have a lot more, erm, worms at my disposal.

BTW–If you’d like to join or check out my LinkedIn community please check here.

Here’s a recent post I did on LinkedIn and Facebook.