LinkedIn, groups and profile views

One benefit of LinkedIn is that it is a useful tool for connecting with people after conferences or meetings. It's easier than filing or organising the growing pile of business cards that build up on your desk. It's also good for getting noticed in the world of research but how best to do that?

Another benefit is that there are lots of groups of experts online that you can ask questions of and be pretty sure of an answer. I had a few queries on different multispectral and hyperspectral camera types for UAVs and I thought this might be a good place to start. Added to that, I read an article recently on ways to increase your number of LinkedIn views

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And one of the top 5 tips is, 'start a discussion'. So I decided to kill two birds with the one stone and started a discussion in late January on LinkedIn on UAV cameras. The results were interesting...

Ok - they aren't astronomical figures. I'm not rivalling One Direction's follower numbers on Twitter and I'm about to return to anonymity, but the improvement is undeniable. I made contact with a number of researchers working in UAVs around the world - useful contacts for future queries or joint applications and I even got a promise of free data. But more importantly I got some valuable first hand reviews of different UAV camera types. Once you filter out the guys trying to sell you their latest hardware you can spot the people who have practical experience of hardware and they are willing to share that info, warts and all.

This led to a tough decision - do you openly criticise hardware on LinkedIn? Are you opening yourself up to a barrage of complaints from the manufacturers online representatives, or even worse, are you making yourself liable for any legal proceedings by harming their sales? In my discussion introduction I erred on the side of caution and mentioned that we had had problems with, 'hardware' in the past - and asked what hardware would people recommend? Unfortunately, by far the most common reply was, 'what hardware have you tried?'. So that left me three options - ignore the replies and never log in to LinkedIn again, reply no-holds-barred on the group discussion thread, risking what I have already mentioned, or chicken out and reply in a PM.

I PM'd anyone who replied asking me to name-and-shame the hardware we had tested. I'm a post-doc, not a professor!