The LinkedIn Message That (Seriously) Annoys Your Contacts

The Muse

An friend of mine emailed me the other day, irritated by a message she’d just received in her LinkedIn inbox. Sent by a recent college grad she had briefly met at a networking event a few weeks prior, the message read:

I was wondering if you could introduce me to [name of very high-level contact]. I have just applied to a position at [company] and I see that she is the VP there. If you could introduce me to her ASAP that would be great.

I could see why my friend was irked. While the sender’s intentions may have been on the right track (“Ooh! I see that someone in my network knows the hiring manager at my dream job!”), she had broken one of the cardinal rules of LinkedIn: Being connected to someone on LinkedIn does not mean that you have a relationship with that person—or that the person would be willing to vouch for you, introduce you to his or her contacts, or otherwise help you unless there’s a pretty good reason.

In other words, there was no way that my friend—who had a closer relationship with her last checker at Trader Joe’s than she did with this woman—was going to go out on a limb to introduce her to one of her most important contacts just because they were connected on LinkedIn. She deleted the message without responding.

This story reminded me that this seemingly simple advice bears repeating: Before you ask for anything from someone in your network, you absolutely must build a relationship.


But what exactly does building a relationship look like, especially when you really need help, um, now? Here’s a LinkedIn message script you can use in similar situations for any of your not-so-close connections. While I can’t promise you’ll get a response, I guarantee your chances will be a whole lot better.

Read the script and the complete Forbes article