LinkedIn-Business Tool that Handles Spam Well

I recently joined LinkedIn since I am trying to build my online rep, and in the month since I have been on, I have received four cold call invites from people whose profiles included tags like “make $100K a year from a $10K investment”, “Unbelievable network opportunity”, and “The most important decision you’ll ever make”. These sound just like the subject lines from several of the spam messages I see in the quarantine folder each and every day, and are, at best questionable business tactics. At first I was pretty disappointed that LinkedIn would be yet another source of spam for me to deal with, but then I did some digging into their system.

There’s a reason why LinkedIn’s website warns users to only accept invites from people they know, and no, it’s not because you don’t want to dilute the quality of your network by accepting invites from anyone who asks. It’s because there are users out there who will try to use anything they can to market their wares, and that includes “cold call” invites to other members. But LinkedIn doesn’t encourage, or even support that practice, and has systems in place to deal with it.

The user agreement does clearly state that LinkedIn has the right to restrict or close the account of any user if warranted, where reasons could include sending spam. Accounts are monitored for user feedback, and those that are flagged by users are dealt with accordingly.

LinkedIn has advice for how to handle these questionable invitations. If it is blatant spam you should click the spam button. But if you receive an invite from someone you do not know, and you feel like the invite is a spam message, you should not simply ignore or delete it, you should click the Ignore button, and then click the “I Don’t Know [Name]” link that appears after you choose to ignore the invite. This not only prevents the sender from sending any more invitations, it provides feedback to LinkedIn. If a user receives such feedback frequently enough, LinkedIn may restrict the sender’s account.

LinkedIn provides guidance to users whose accounts are restricted, so that legitimate users won’t be restricted for no reason, or can appeal the restriction, which makes for a fair system for all concerned. I think this is a fair and equitable way of handling things, and should be held out as a model for other membership based networks and forums, to both encourage communication between subscribers, and to protect them all from spam.

What about you? What other social networks/discussion groups/distribution lists/forums  do you belong to that handle the issue of spam to their members, either well or poorly? What do you think about how LinkedIn handles spam? Leave a comment and let us know.