LinkedIn has “invisible” bugs in the invitation process that may make you think you are sending a group of invitations when you really aren’t.  Here’s an example of one…

Details:

If you want, you can skip to the video below and see a 3 minute demo of this LinkedIn invitations bug, but here is a text explanation if you’d rather read about it.

If you want to invite 5-25 people to join your LinkedIn network, and you have a list of email addresses, you probably follow the instructions below:

• Click Add Connections on the left of your home page
• On the right, enter the email addresses
  • (Note: you can “Stretch” the email address area)
• Change the personal invitation
• See the green acknowledgement box at the top the confirms that emails were sent
• Continue on your merry way, assuming that all of those people got an invitation

However,

• you may have put the email addresses on separate lines
• you may not have put a comma between each email address
  • (this is most likely if you get a list of emails from an excel spreadsheet)
• you probably didn’t compare the count of emails with the number of invitations that were actually sent

The insidious bug is that if any email address doesn’t have a comma after it, LinkedIn ignores all of the ones after it, and doesn’t tell you about it.  Not so merry now, are you?

At least now you know that you have to do a sanity check to make sure LinkedIn processed all of the email addresses that you gave to it.  I have seen similar behavior in other parts of LinkedIn, so be careful!

Here’s a video that actually illustrates this.  It contains no explosions, supermodels, or inappropriate language, and no animals were harmed in the creation of the video.

Hope this helps.

This blog entry will give you the steps necessary to remove a LinkedIn connection, which is not as easy as you might think.  It could have been titled “How to dump Patrick O’Malley”.

Details:

I get this all the time.  Patrick, I don’t want to date you anymore, I don’t want to be your LinkedIn connection, and I want to defriend you on Facebook.  Oh, and stop following me on Twitter.  Can you please tell me how to do that?

Therefore, I figured I’d write it down to make the break-ups less painful.  If you want to “disconnect” from a current connection on LinkedIn, here’s what you do:

• Go to your LinkedIn home page
• On the left hand side, expand the + button to the right of the word Contacts if it is not already expanded
• Click Connections
• In the upper right hand corner (in a place you’re unlikely to look), click Remove Connections
• Click the box next to the user’s names
• On the right, click “Remove Connections”

Oddly enough, there’s no way to do it while you are looking at the person’s profile, which is one of the places you’d expect it to be.

Note that LinkedIn does not tell the other person that you have disconnected from them, so they may never know you’ve dumped them unless they specifically look.  That’s pretty cool.

However, most women go out of their way to tell me they’re doing it.  That’s pretty cold.

Another note – thanks to the folks from http://www.executivesnetwork.com in today’s “LinkedIn webinar for executives” for asking the question, and for helping to figure it out on the fly.

Good luck!