Amongst the recent moments that have provided some instance of insight towards how we get along at the intersection of faith and mobile tech, LinkedIn has provided some good insight that its easy to forget about at times.

The situations have been around the simple idea of people asking to connect on LinkedIn. As many of you might do, making a connection on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social networks is as simple as putting in an email address and then sending the request to connect. For personal connections to LinkedIn, I keep a pretty decent policy of not saying ‘yes’ to every connection request, and usually ignoring those which come without any kind of contextualization as to why the person wants to connect. Its a simple philosophy and has really cut down on the amount of email spam recevied.

Weird thing has been that over the past weeks, I’ve had a sizable increase in connection requests. Most of these have been without any additional message or context as to where I know them from. So, instead of the quick reject, I’ve been sending a message thanking folks for the connection request and then asking for more information as to why they want to connect. A few have come back with apologies, and a few others have illustrated an interesting issue with the LinkedIn connection interface – specifically the feature where you are asked to put in your email address and the LinkedIn (or any other social networks) then uses your address book – saved and unsaved contacts – to find for potential connections. Its not a bad idea on their part, just one that some people miss saying no to.

That brings up the question and approach piece for this post:

• Does your church resource, membership, newsletter, or other community system have a means to subscribe and unsubscribe people from easily – and not easy as defined by the peron who built it, but defined by those who will only occasionally use it?
• What approaches are you taking in regards to opting in and out of services that you or your organization sponsors?

Because at the end of the day, if staying attached to you is perplexing, then perhaps your message is as well.