Adventures in Add Me

(Views expressed are my own, not Plaxo’s.)

Stuart, the head of HR, is leaving Plaxo. One interesting aspect is that he mentions that you should go to his public LinkedIn Profile for his contact information.

That’s a little weird as Plaxo has a much more useful add me to your address book.

Plaxo and LinkedIn

A lot of people ask how Plaxo competes with LinkedIn (or [insert YASNS]).

The answer is they do not.

LinkedIn is about growing your (professional) contact network. Plaxo is about maintaining your network.

In other words, Plaxo doesn’t replace social networking services, it complements them.

I’m a firm believer in this. For instance, here is my LinkedIn Profile.

The problem I have is that if you download the vCards from your contact contact in LinkedIn and upload them to your address book (and merge duplicates how???), you are left with a sparse, almost unusable bit of information. However it does have their primary e-mail address. If you sync this address book with Plaxo, you will never have to actively maintain that connection again.

You seeing it?

Add Me

Back to Stuart and his LinkedIn profile. I think this is embarrassing because Stuart isn’t looking to grow his large network—he’s been doing H.R. at Plaxo, I assume his network is already way too large.

His post is about linking his existing friends to his latest information. When he mentioned LinkedIn as the “best way” to reach him, I think this means we’ve not been doing our job at Plaxo.

In light of this, here are the instructions that Ryan gave him on adding his Plaxo Cards to his blog:

  1. Sign in to Plaxo Online
  2. Go to the My Plaxo link at the top
  3. At the bottom of that page, you should see a Tip:
  4. Click the link to that. It should be something like https://www.plaxo.com/add_me_link
  5. Fill out which info you want to share, and the link will be generated at the bottom. You can cut and paste from there to put it in your blog.

I hope Plaxo makes this both more obvious and easier in a future release.

(I don’t work on this part of the site anymore.)

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