Back in January, Vivien from Inspirationbit started an ambitious project – the social media mega project. The idea was to bring together information on the most important social media tools by asking bloggers to contribute their posts on the topic.

(The other participants are – for Del.icio.us: Aaron Stroud from On financial success; for Facebook: Ina from Inspiring Wear; for flickr & zooomr: Brian Auer from Epic Edits; for Stumbleupon, youtube, myspace: Karen Zara from a1-fan-fun; for Sphinn. Simonne from All tips and tricks; for Second life: Dandellion from Metaverse; for Mixx, netscape, squidoo: Pearl from Fresh perspectives; for Sk*rt, blogging zoom, bvibes: jhs from Colloquium; for Digg, reddit: Vivien at InspirationBit; and for Technorati: Monica at Me like the interweb.)

Here on Alphablogs, we hosted the section on LinkedIn. What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is an online network of more than 20 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries.

When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients, and partners. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you.

Your network consists of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to thousands of qualified professionals.

Here are the submissions:

At All Tips and Tricks, Simonne says:

I still see LinkedIn as a cool place to meet people you’ve once known and forgot about them, a place to start building new connections, and why not, a place to check on your potential bosses or partners.

In an interview with Vivien at Inspirationbit, entrepreneur Rastin Mehr observes

I kind of like LinkedIn’s Q&A – it is like sitting in the boardroom of traditional companies and eavesdropping on what the old school managers think about the current state of Internet industry. Traditionally having that kind of close encounter required knowing a friend, who knew a friend, who knew a friend within a corporation.

Here is an absolutely fabulous guide on how to use LinkedIn for your job search, plus it’s followed by a slew of more links to posts on LinkedIn. Fantastic job, Jacob from JobMob!

And I don’t know if this counts as entries to the project, but if you go to this post, you’ll find a few great success stories about LinkedIn that bloggers Lisa Gates, Gerrit Visser, Terrence Seamon and Director Tom shared with me in response to this project.

Most group writing projects I’ve participated in had many more entries than this one. I wonder why we had so few for this project? Here are some thoughts:

First, I think I could have gotten way more participation had I signed up with the Yahoo LinkedIn bloggers group. Why didn’t I do that? Because I’m only a superficial user of LinkedIn. After spending about 30 minutes trying to hunt down the LinkedIn profile badge I was required to show on this blog in order to become a member of that Yahoo group, I gave up. If I was a more well-versed user of LinkedIn, I probably would have known exactly where to pick up that badge, or, alternatively, I wouldn’t have given up after 30 minutes.

This is an example of something I have observed before: Even though these types of social media are free and open, there is still an invisible barrier between superficial and in-depth users. The fact that I had more submissions regarding Twitter on my other blog – a social media tool on which I spend quite a bit of time – bears that out.

Second, I suspect that group writing projects are part of a culture of bloggers who may not be hard-core social media types. For example, if you google for “group writing project” on Twitter pages you get – 9 hits. Nine. On LinkedIn? Zero. On my other site? 31. Yes. Little old Change Therapy with her under 1,000 posts has more than three times more hits on that topic than Twitter.

Group writing projects seem to be something that’s done much more by bloggers in the self improvement / productivity / “artsy” world than by the people who dominate social media: geeks (who have blogs but are constantly exploring the outer technological edges of the world) and people who like to chat and socialize, who often don’t have blogs.

What do you people think?