Yeah, you read that right, XTREME! I updated about this on Facebook a while ago but since I email everyone that reads this blog, I think you all need a longer explanation.
John being the Social Networking guru that he is suggested that I set up a profile on Linkedin. In case you aren’t familiar, Linkedin is a business-oriented social networking site mainly used for professional networking. The purpose of the site is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business. You can post your resume, network with people in the same industry and search job listings through the site. In my job search you can see how this would be a valuable tool.
I go to the site to set up my profile, I get my resume uploaded and fill out all the required information. The next step is to import your contacts from your email carrier and select who you would like to send “invitations” to. I imported my contacts, selected the people I was going to try and connect with and before I could send them it said I needed to verify my email address by clicking on a link they had just emailed to me. I get out of the site, go to my gmail account, click on the link and then click “send invitations”. Here is where things went awry. I thought that it would have saved who I wanted to send my invitations to. It did not. I sent an email to each and every contact in my address book in gmail. The thing about gmail is that once you have emailed someone once….whether directly or by simply clicking “reply all” to an email, it saves the address to your contacts. Boom, 206 people had been invited to connect with me on Linkedin.
The story does not begin or end there. The most embarrasing part of the whole story is that I had received an email from my friend who now lives in Wyoming earlier in the day with pictures of her darling baby girls (twins!). I wrote back to her telling her how adorable they were and how I can’t believe how fast they were growing. I had also relayed the information that I had recently been laid off from HairM because we were coworkers there at one time. Instead of replying to her directly, I had accidentally hit “reply all”. Well, Rachel got my email, and so did all of her relatives receiving the update on the babies progress. After I realized this Iimmediately sent another email apologizing for the mass email. I did get a very kind email back saying:
Don’t worry about the mass email, good luck on your job search! From Rachel’s Cool uncle Bruce
Have you put two and two together yet? I sent Linkedin invitations to my girlfriends entire family including Cool Uncle Bruce! I was mortified when I figured it out. At least Cool Uncle Bruce accepted my invitation! I sent him a message on Linkedin explaining once again that I had made a mistake and accidentally sent an invitation to everyone in my contacts.
Not only did all these people get invitiations to join me on the network, if they haven’t accepted yet, they got reminders today! I found out when Shanna emailed me because a classmate of her husbands asked why I was trying to get him to join Linkedin and wanted to know what the heck it was in the first place. This guy has no idea who I am and since Shanna and I have different last names he was curious who was sending him multiple invitations. Through my profile he found this blog and saw pictures of me before he realized that I was Shanna’s twin. I believe he told Shanna he figured it out when he noticed that we looked an awful lot alike.
You’d think I was a novice to this whole interwebs thing! For craps sake, I STARTED my own social networking site (plug: if you haven’t checked it out, you should check it out and join our community www.thewhineclub.com).
Sigh. This can’t bode well for my job search. And I apologize for the multiple invites I’m sure you recieved. Oh you didn’t get one? Just check your other email address, I’m sure it’s there…..at least twice.
Heather, you are so funny. It was a mistake. I love the way you write.