One more question from my presentation at the AFP conference in LA last week.
Should my Linked In contacts be open or closed?
Since the purpose of sites like Linked In are for business and social networking, keeping your contacts private is not conducive to getting people enthused about joining your network. My recommendation is a public profile and open contacts.
That said, I believe it is important to protect network integrity. Canned invitations from open networkers who are simply trying to add to their already huge numbers of contacts isn’t really networking, it’s rolodexing. Consider your target audience and then be discriminating in accepting and issuing personally–written invitations.