The problem is that LinkedIn got sucked into serving one very specific demographic: recruiters.
It would be as if Facebook decided to focus obsessively on serving college students. It's a good initial strategy, but eventually you have to serve bigger markets.
If I were in charge at LinkedIn I'd focus it on becoming the number one place for professionals to exchange information, create and manage events, and connect with like minded colleagues.
There's a huge potential in this because most professions don't have particularly good online social networks. Oftentimes they're old fashioned discussion boards behind paywalls, comments sections of popular blogs and other half-ass solutions.
Interestingly, my vision really wouldn't do much for software engineers and developers. I think StackOverflow, meetups, and other resources already provide this.
It boggles my mind that they didn't take this route and instead they became the social network for the unemployed as another commenter aptly described them.
It's a business school case study waiting to be written.
I only created my LinkedIn account because our major supplier (before they recently got acquired) used LinkedIn to run "round table" type events, and O were often invited to talk about the product.
In the interest of playing nice with the supplier I played along, but it was always a horrible experience. You don't realise how far from "real time" LinkedIn is until you're in a Skype chat, two people are discussing a question and the rest of the room is complaining it hasn't rendered for them yet. Not for seconds.. minutes. Eventually you would end up with statements I made at the end rendering right at the top with people then replying stating they can't understand what I said without any context.
People were obviously interested in using it for these sorts of events but there seemed to be no interest in making it a tolerable experience.
That is a problem. When I first joined Linkedin, one of the first questions I asked openly was about the difference between "pass by value" vs. "pass by reference". There were some good people in those forums.
Over time, I'd get all these tech recruiters whom I've never worked with in any context yet wanted me to be networked with them. A few I said yes to though I never felt very good about it.
As Linkedin requests by Linkedin and email got more obnoxious, I became less and less inclined to have any honest technical discussions that would expose my ignorance to a more and more recruiter-centric audience. I felt better posing those kinds of questions on StackOverflow or even Reddit than I would on Linkedin.
Eventually, I did delete my Linkedin account completely. It's funny. Even unemployed, I don't miss it at all.
LinkedIn went through phases every 18 months or so of switching schizophrenically between "Our problem is lack of engagement, we need new features to entice our userbase to come back on a daily basis" and "Our problem is lack of focus, we are going to kill a bunch of features and return to our core competency".
I think Jobcase is trying to fill the job-related market niche for non-IT professionals.
I personally find LinkedIn useful as companies and jobs reconnaissance tool.
Vision or not, they have exceptional engineering talent able to draw conclusions about who my ex girlfriends are from 20 years ago and suggest I connect with them.
Or somehow to draw conclusions about who I communicated with on an anonymous dating site and suggest I connect with them.
I'm looking forward to the day that as I walk down the street wearing my Augmented Reality glasses, LinkedIn transparently identifies the faces of the passing people and suggests that I connect to each long lost deeply valued relationship, or suggests I connect to the person walking past who has been stalking me online after I went on one date with them and hated them. Viva LinkedIn!
If "being creepy" is their core business model then they are a great success!
I mean really, take Facebook. Does it suck in some ways? Yes. Does it set the privacy defaults a bit more lenient than my own preferences? Sure.. but I use it and I've found it trivially easy to grasp some of its privacy basics, and set the settings according to my wishes, such that it's usable within my privacy wishes. Further, they've at various times prompted me to look into my privacy settings. All of this has been under enormous scrutiny and pressure, they're no saints... but for me it's a reasonable product in my own experience. If need be, I wouldn't feel bad about closing my FB account because it'd mean FB just wasn't for me, rather than FB is trying to screw me left and right and I need to get out.
Linkedin is very much unlike that, every interaction I have with it says 'close your account because you don't know what the hell Linkedin is doing', and I've not logged on in at least half a year because I fear what kind of alerts and notifications they'll send to my network on the basis of me visiting a few pages there. Like when I turned off 'see who visited my profile', so that I could turn off 'let people see I visited their profile'. A few days later I check my best friends' linkedin because I was updating mine and looking for inspiration, and he jokingly messages me I'm stalking him on linkedin. I couldn't care less he saw that, he's my best friend, but what the f, I just turned that feature off? It's just an accumulation of stuff like that where I've completely lost my trust.
> If "being creepy" is their core business model then they are a great success!
Totally my experience. And I'm even one of those people who's pretty good at bs options, like a tiny remark that give permission for linkedin to email your entire gmail contact list (i.e. anyone you ever conversed with, like say a guy from craigslist you bought a fishbowl from 7 years ago). Even then I feel like Linkedin is just screwing me in broad daylight while I'm paying my utmost attention.
Actually the 'monetization' of LinkedIn against non-recruiter members has really dampened my enthusiasm for the company. So many things that I used to be able to do as a member for free have been cut off. I got a chance to talk to someone about that and their off the record comment was that two things had happened, first recruiters were using their own profiles to do research rather than using the tools that LinkedIn tried to sell them, and two when they restricted access they found their "meat" members started paying for the service of knowing things like "who looked at my profile." Win win! sort of.
The interesting thing was this trick, a recruiter creates a fake profile that has the same characteristics of a candidate they are trying to place. They wait for the LinkedIn AI scripts to send their fake profile a list of companies that are looking for people like that fake profile (and thus their actual client) and then they are spamming those companies HR/Jobs/other emails to try to get their candidate in front of the company So much easier than trying to lie your way into figuring out who was hiring and for what.
The thing for me personally, is after some of their past behavior I just don't trust them enough to use the site regularly. I'm thinking specifically of their extremely aggressive and manipulative attempts to gain access to your email contacts and spam people you know. While I'm not specifically worried about that one specific thing, the fact that they were willing to do something like that makes me think they're willing to do other things I'd disagree with. When it's your professional reputation and contacts at stake it just feels a little bit too risky to use it regularly.
That said, it really is a useful tool for keeping track of where people have gone and what they're presently up to, I just can't imagine ever using it regularly when I don't entirely trust them.
Linkedin has become a creepy social network, with those hundreds of headhunters trying to build their database and mostly spamming you with worse and worse offers, with those creepy notifications that "somebody has visited your profile", looking more like average dating site more than something professional.
Yes, it seems that LinkedIn is lacking a vision on how to make looking for a job a better experience.
Linked in employees probably can't update their profile without attracting unwanted attention from managers who will hound them about "why are you leaving?!?!" and hence, you know everything you need to.
Does that happen at LinkedIn, or are you just assuming? It sounds a little weird, actually. Why would a manager get agitated about one of his/her people actually updating their skills on their very own site?
I'd be suspicious if someone was not updating their profile at least once or twice a year.
Though, in practice, I would just avoid managerial stalking of my employees. So what if someone's keeping their profile up to date? So what if they're checking out the market regularly. We all do it. You'd be a fool not to.
I don't get why updating your profile is associated to "looking for a job". For me it's good to have the profile in a good shape since it can create leads.
They should probably rebrand as SpammedIn. The only people I hear from there are recruiters, and not very good ones as they don't even seem to bother to read my profile. I occasionally find its useful for tracking down people I want to get in touch with, though I can usually find their email pretty easily via other means. It's sad, because it could have been a really useful tool for networking and exchanging information.
As an employer, I posted a job ad a couple weeks ago, paid a few hundred dollars, and got 2 non-qualified applicants. Many of my 'connections' (friends) saw the posting and clicked the job posting...and LinkedIn reported these ads views (making me think my posting was more popular than it actually was). Needless to say, it was a learning experience and I'll be sticking to Indeed. I'd short LNKD...
Haven't updated my LinkedIn profile for a long time, and I get friended all the time by strangers and I don't even know if it makes any sense, but I just accept them... How do you use LinkedIn? Please share your ways...
I accept only people I know, but my bar is lower than my bar on Facebook. Basically anyone I've (or could have) exchanged business cards with is ok.
I actually find LinkedIn very useful, and am kind of baffled by people who say they find zero value in it. I do find many of their practices annoying; it's far from perfect. And I agree with a lot in the article. But I've been working for 20 years, and having a reasonably complete way to search all of my former co-workers, and where they currently work is amazingly powerful. Whenever I am thinking of applying to a job at some company, I can spend 30 seconds looking on LinkedIn to see if I already know someone inside (which not only drastically improves my chances of getting an interview, but also can yield much more candid information about what it's like to work there). Similarly, if I need a professional contact at some company to solve a problem at work, my LinkedIn account is hugely useful.
This might be skewed by the fact that I've worked in some pretty big-name companies, so I have a large network of other people who tend to work at well-known places. But I basically view it as an automatically updating and easily searchable rolodex. And it works great for that.
I haven't updated mine in several years, especially employment history (this one step reduced recruiter spam for me to almost nothing). I use LinkedIn entirely as a "research tool" to find connections into companies, or to keep up with previous coworkers current employers. I only accept invitations from people I (a) know personally, (b) have done business with, or (c) see a potential business relationship evolving.
I recently registered a domain on GoDaddy (I know of all places) and within 12 hours had over 30 requests on LinkedIn from developers looking to sell their services to me. If anything it is a good upsell for GoDaddy by forcing your hand at WhoIs Guard.
Similarly it does seem that installing the LinkedIn app on your phone spies on who you call/contact/look at online which translates into recommendations. A few months ago I had someone give me their business card and I called them the next day to follow up. I had not entered any of their details in my contacts or emailed them prior. After the call I went to connect with them on LinkedIn and sure enough the first person in the "People You May Know" section was this person.
I use it as an alternative to Facebook which I stopped using shortly after I joined. My friends and co-workers are the people I look to keep in touch with, not the people I went to grade school with.
Lost its vision? LinkedIn has felt useless for years. It's that "social network" that clogs up my inbox no matter how many times I changed the notification settings and nothing more to me.
The worst part is, those e-mails are useless. I keep getting ones informing me that there are five jobs changes in my network. I'm actually curious about who has gone where and click the link and it takes me to...well, I don't even know what I'm looking at.
Afters years of working as a freelance writer and not doing too well lately, I took a stab at getting one of those "real" jobs which required references. I decided to look at my LinkedIn profile for the first time in ages to see who might be able to help.
I click "My Network" and get this pop-over that takes up the whole screen asking me to "grow my network" and effectively hiding the information I came for in the first place. How is this supposed to be useful?
Completely agreed. Shady practises (eg: email spam), plus dark patterns (eg presenting people who might be a connection as having actually sent a "Connection Request") have made it fundamentally a not-to-be-trusted website.
My LinkedIn profile now literally tells recruiters to Fuck Off. And still they come.
The only value it has for me, is presenting (generally) valid contact details (eg: email address) for the people I already know and whom I may have fallen out of contact with. That's not huge value though, and several times I've been seriously tempted to just remove my profile forever.
OP here. Sadly, true. The sad thing is that LinkedIn has the potential to truly help its members grow their careers. Instead it is distracted by building the next Salesforce tool.
Why not write that in your summary yourself, rather than wait for LinkedIn to figure it out? It's not a finely searchable field, but at least it's there.
I haven't touched linked-in in quite a while but an idea that I would enjoy: bring all the value of the meat-world conference online.
Across each major industry vertical, it could organise say a quarterly event featuring webcasts and q&a from industry legends, moderated discussions, workshops plus all the networking and promotional activities. Bit like a MOOC but focussed on professionals not students.
It would make the networking aspect of linked-in meaningful. It shouldn't be passive rolodex, linked-in should get off their ass and actually work to help us create real new connections with people we interact with in the events and activities they host.
>LinkedIn’s own employees don’t see the value of updating their own LinkedIn profile!
Huh? It's a company of 8,000+ people, and a random screenshot of 4 profiles leads you to this conclusion? In any company of thousands you're going find at least some people that don't find utility in the product that company is creating. Surely that's obvious? You'd need to actually perform a proper statistical study to know for sure.
1. I don't have access to all that data do that sort of analysis. If you have that access, run the analysis and get back to me. I was writing an opinion piece, not an academic paper.
2. The people in question are all managers and above. A good demographic of LinkedIn's sweet spot.
3. These people in question, I met personally. And each one of them expressed some variant of not seeing a personal need to update their own profile.
4. Most of my personal friends understand that they are supposed to get "something" from their LinkedIn profile - they just don't know what that "something" is.
So, as an intellectual exercise, what would I want from a "perfect" LinkedIn:
- well I gotta trust it, so all of the below I cannot see LinkedIn actually doing but
- become a contact manager. When did I last call / mail this person.
- become a graphical network tool - show me my personal business network
- and remind me who I have not called despite really wanting to
- What about? Did I promise anything? Did they? Keep reminding me of my todos
LinkedIn is great for someone like my wife, who avoids Facebook as a time sink, and calls LinkedIn a "Facebook for grownups". It's been a useful way for her to connect with people without the cruft of looking at kitten pictures and what someone ate for breakfast.
I log in maybe twice a month, and that's sufficient for me. I hope it works for LinkedIn as well, because I'd like them to stay in business, but I'm happy with my level of involvement which I suspect is similar to that of many others who are also overcommitted on other networks like Facebook, Plus, Twitter, etc.
I do find myself spending more time there (i.e. staying logged on for a longer period) because of the blogging/article stream, much of which involves issues I'm interested in -- employment, technology, the markets, future trends. Truly, it is a Facebook for grownups, at least for me and my friends.
I'd rather just a big filter on Facebook and some added resume features for that. Let me create a professional profile and add professional friends to it. Add a searchable resume system and we're good.
Tbh, LinkedIn only has value if you are looking for a job. The majority of its features are nearly worthless to the general population of users.
This being the case I think there is an opportunity for a lean site with a narrow vertical [e.g. software devs which are heavily recruited by internal recruiters] to dislodge LinkedIn. Of course they'd have to solely sell your resume to recruiters. All the other revenue streams and related issues would have to be dropped.
March 28, 2016 at 2:13 am
As the editor-in-chief of a management magazine (Strategy+Business, www.strategy-business.com), I have a different perspective on this.
The potential value of LinkedIn is as a vehicle for showing up professionally. Within a company, and often outside, people realize their aspirations by demonstrating what they can do distinctively.
That goes beyond having a personal brand: it involves having relationship equity, reputational equity, and competence – all of which accrue, over time, just as powerfully as interest-earning capital. LinkedIn is a vehicle for accelerating this, which is why it has value as a platform for publishing articles etc.
It's also why the spam issue is serious - to the extent it interferes with that platform.
The problem articulated here stems from a confusion between public and professional identities. They’re not the same thing. They involve different kinds of equity. A public identity requires having a reputation and presence. We need to be able to publish, critique, and show up. LinkedIn is a platform.
A professional identity requires relationships and connection. For managing relationships, we need to be able to prune and prioritize people. Avoiding spam is critical. LinkedIn is a connection point. I too use it to find people and try to contact them.
For both purposes, we need aspirational guidance, damage control (dealing with rumors etc.), and the ability to have one place where people can always find us. To the extent LinkedIn offers these transparently, it can monetize them.
It hasn’t, in my view, lost its vision. It’s grappling with the fact that its vision is complicated. And the tools are not always clear. The user interface gets in the way. Is that a trust issue - or just a user experience issue?
Thanks for posting this . I appreciated this essay and the comments.
Reply
[+] [-] tryitnow|10 years ago|reply
It would be as if Facebook decided to focus obsessively on serving college students. It's a good initial strategy, but eventually you have to serve bigger markets.
If I were in charge at LinkedIn I'd focus it on becoming the number one place for professionals to exchange information, create and manage events, and connect with like minded colleagues.
There's a huge potential in this because most professions don't have particularly good online social networks. Oftentimes they're old fashioned discussion boards behind paywalls, comments sections of popular blogs and other half-ass solutions.
Interestingly, my vision really wouldn't do much for software engineers and developers. I think StackOverflow, meetups, and other resources already provide this.
It boggles my mind that they didn't take this route and instead they became the social network for the unemployed as another commenter aptly described them.
It's a business school case study waiting to be written.
[+] [-] technion|10 years ago|reply
In the interest of playing nice with the supplier I played along, but it was always a horrible experience. You don't realise how far from "real time" LinkedIn is until you're in a Skype chat, two people are discussing a question and the rest of the room is complaining it hasn't rendered for them yet. Not for seconds.. minutes. Eventually you would end up with statements I made at the end rendering right at the top with people then replying stating they can't understand what I said without any context.
People were obviously interested in using it for these sorts of events but there seemed to be no interest in making it a tolerable experience.
[+] [-] pcote|10 years ago|reply
Over time, I'd get all these tech recruiters whom I've never worked with in any context yet wanted me to be networked with them. A few I said yes to though I never felt very good about it.
As Linkedin requests by Linkedin and email got more obnoxious, I became less and less inclined to have any honest technical discussions that would expose my ignorance to a more and more recruiter-centric audience. I felt better posing those kinds of questions on StackOverflow or even Reddit than I would on Linkedin.
Eventually, I did delete my Linkedin account completely. It's funny. Even unemployed, I don't miss it at all.
[+] [-] shalmanese|10 years ago|reply
Nothing ever shipped to break that cycle.
[+] [-] bliti|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ots|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hoodoof|10 years ago|reply
Or somehow to draw conclusions about who I communicated with on an anonymous dating site and suggest I connect with them.
I'm looking forward to the day that as I walk down the street wearing my Augmented Reality glasses, LinkedIn transparently identifies the faces of the passing people and suggests that I connect to each long lost deeply valued relationship, or suggests I connect to the person walking past who has been stalking me online after I went on one date with them and hated them. Viva LinkedIn!
If "being creepy" is their core business model then they are a great success!
[+] [-] IkmoIkmo|10 years ago|reply
I mean really, take Facebook. Does it suck in some ways? Yes. Does it set the privacy defaults a bit more lenient than my own preferences? Sure.. but I use it and I've found it trivially easy to grasp some of its privacy basics, and set the settings according to my wishes, such that it's usable within my privacy wishes. Further, they've at various times prompted me to look into my privacy settings. All of this has been under enormous scrutiny and pressure, they're no saints... but for me it's a reasonable product in my own experience. If need be, I wouldn't feel bad about closing my FB account because it'd mean FB just wasn't for me, rather than FB is trying to screw me left and right and I need to get out.
Linkedin is very much unlike that, every interaction I have with it says 'close your account because you don't know what the hell Linkedin is doing', and I've not logged on in at least half a year because I fear what kind of alerts and notifications they'll send to my network on the basis of me visiting a few pages there. Like when I turned off 'see who visited my profile', so that I could turn off 'let people see I visited their profile'. A few days later I check my best friends' linkedin because I was updating mine and looking for inspiration, and he jokingly messages me I'm stalking him on linkedin. I couldn't care less he saw that, he's my best friend, but what the f, I just turned that feature off? It's just an accumulation of stuff like that where I've completely lost my trust.
> If "being creepy" is their core business model then they are a great success!
Totally my experience. And I'm even one of those people who's pretty good at bs options, like a tiny remark that give permission for linkedin to email your entire gmail contact list (i.e. anyone you ever conversed with, like say a guy from craigslist you bought a fishbowl from 7 years ago). Even then I feel like Linkedin is just screwing me in broad daylight while I'm paying my utmost attention.
[+] [-] justinclift|10 years ago|reply
LinkedIn is kind of like... troll food.
[+] [-] wodenokoto|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tacone|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|10 years ago|reply
The interesting thing was this trick, a recruiter creates a fake profile that has the same characteristics of a candidate they are trying to place. They wait for the LinkedIn AI scripts to send their fake profile a list of companies that are looking for people like that fake profile (and thus their actual client) and then they are spamming those companies HR/Jobs/other emails to try to get their candidate in front of the company So much easier than trying to lie your way into figuring out who was hiring and for what.
[+] [-] overgard|10 years ago|reply
That said, it really is a useful tool for keeping track of where people have gone and what they're presently up to, I just can't imagine ever using it regularly when I don't entirely trust them.
[+] [-] melvinmt|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haddr|10 years ago|reply
Yes, it seems that LinkedIn is lacking a vision on how to make looking for a job a better experience.
[+] [-] msandford|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blisterpeanuts|10 years ago|reply
I'd be suspicious if someone was not updating their profile at least once or twice a year.
Though, in practice, I would just avoid managerial stalking of my employees. So what if someone's keeping their profile up to date? So what if they're checking out the market regularly. We all do it. You'd be a fool not to.
[+] [-] jozan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianmcconnell|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyrelb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] T-A|10 years ago|reply
This: https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...
Not very informative to plot a price chart in isolation, without any kind of comparison to the sector or broader stock market...
[+] [-] tshtf|10 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...
[+] [-] ddon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zippergz|10 years ago|reply
I actually find LinkedIn very useful, and am kind of baffled by people who say they find zero value in it. I do find many of their practices annoying; it's far from perfect. And I agree with a lot in the article. But I've been working for 20 years, and having a reasonably complete way to search all of my former co-workers, and where they currently work is amazingly powerful. Whenever I am thinking of applying to a job at some company, I can spend 30 seconds looking on LinkedIn to see if I already know someone inside (which not only drastically improves my chances of getting an interview, but also can yield much more candid information about what it's like to work there). Similarly, if I need a professional contact at some company to solve a problem at work, my LinkedIn account is hugely useful.
This might be skewed by the fact that I've worked in some pretty big-name companies, so I have a large network of other people who tend to work at well-known places. But I basically view it as an automatically updating and easily searchable rolodex. And it works great for that.
[+] [-] jeffmould|10 years ago|reply
I recently registered a domain on GoDaddy (I know of all places) and within 12 hours had over 30 requests on LinkedIn from developers looking to sell their services to me. If anything it is a good upsell for GoDaddy by forcing your hand at WhoIs Guard.
Similarly it does seem that installing the LinkedIn app on your phone spies on who you call/contact/look at online which translates into recommendations. A few months ago I had someone give me their business card and I called them the next day to follow up. I had not entered any of their details in my contacts or emailed them prior. After the call I went to connect with them on LinkedIn and sure enough the first person in the "People You May Know" section was this person.
[+] [-] hueving|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partisan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fweespee_ch|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tragic|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loudandskittish|10 years ago|reply
The worst part is, those e-mails are useless. I keep getting ones informing me that there are five jobs changes in my network. I'm actually curious about who has gone where and click the link and it takes me to...well, I don't even know what I'm looking at.
Afters years of working as a freelance writer and not doing too well lately, I took a stab at getting one of those "real" jobs which required references. I decided to look at my LinkedIn profile for the first time in ages to see who might be able to help.
I click "My Network" and get this pop-over that takes up the whole screen asking me to "grow my network" and effectively hiding the information I came for in the first place. How is this supposed to be useful?
[+] [-] justinclift|10 years ago|reply
My LinkedIn profile now literally tells recruiters to Fuck Off. And still they come.
The only value it has for me, is presenting (generally) valid contact details (eg: email address) for the people I already know and whom I may have fallen out of contact with. That's not huge value though, and several times I've been seriously tempted to just remove my profile forever.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] alkonaut|10 years ago|reply
I'd be very happy to provide that and it would be a gold mine for their paying customer, the recruiter.
Now I get tons of recruitment spam for things I wouldn't dream of doing, and the things I'd like to do but haven't yet done aren't visible anywhere.
So many missed opportunities in this product it's amazing.
[+] [-] pm24601|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a3n|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duncanawoods|10 years ago|reply
Across each major industry vertical, it could organise say a quarterly event featuring webcasts and q&a from industry legends, moderated discussions, workshops plus all the networking and promotional activities. Bit like a MOOC but focussed on professionals not students.
It would make the networking aspect of linked-in meaningful. It shouldn't be passive rolodex, linked-in should get off their ass and actually work to help us create real new connections with people we interact with in the events and activities they host.
[+] [-] otoolep|10 years ago|reply
Huh? It's a company of 8,000+ people, and a random screenshot of 4 profiles leads you to this conclusion? In any company of thousands you're going find at least some people that don't find utility in the product that company is creating. Surely that's obvious? You'd need to actually perform a proper statistical study to know for sure.
[+] [-] pm24601|10 years ago|reply
Some points here:
1. I don't have access to all that data do that sort of analysis. If you have that access, run the analysis and get back to me. I was writing an opinion piece, not an academic paper.
2. The people in question are all managers and above. A good demographic of LinkedIn's sweet spot.
3. These people in question, I met personally. And each one of them expressed some variant of not seeing a personal need to update their own profile.
4. Most of my personal friends understand that they are supposed to get "something" from their LinkedIn profile - they just don't know what that "something" is.
5. LinkedIn has potential that it is wasting.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|10 years ago|reply
- well I gotta trust it, so all of the below I cannot see LinkedIn actually doing but - become a contact manager. When did I last call / mail this person. - become a graphical network tool - show me my personal business network - and remind me who I have not called despite really wanting to
- What about? Did I promise anything? Did they? Keep reminding me of my todos
[+] [-] joshuapinter|10 years ago|reply
I shot you a quick email with a private beta invite in case you want to give it a go.
Thanks for the validation. :)
Josh
[+] [-] blisterpeanuts|10 years ago|reply
I log in maybe twice a month, and that's sufficient for me. I hope it works for LinkedIn as well, because I'd like them to stay in business, but I'm happy with my level of involvement which I suspect is similar to that of many others who are also overcommitted on other networks like Facebook, Plus, Twitter, etc.
I do find myself spending more time there (i.e. staying logged on for a longer period) because of the blogging/article stream, much of which involves issues I'm interested in -- employment, technology, the markets, future trends. Truly, it is a Facebook for grownups, at least for me and my friends.
[+] [-] Pxtl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dawhizkid|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fweespee_ch|10 years ago|reply
This being the case I think there is an opportunity for a lean site with a narrow vertical [e.g. software devs which are heavily recruited by internal recruiters] to dislodge LinkedIn. Of course they'd have to solely sell your resume to recruiters. All the other revenue streams and related issues would have to be dropped.
[+] [-] ArtKleiner|10 years ago|reply
The potential value of LinkedIn is as a vehicle for showing up professionally. Within a company, and often outside, people realize their aspirations by demonstrating what they can do distinctively.
That goes beyond having a personal brand: it involves having relationship equity, reputational equity, and competence – all of which accrue, over time, just as powerfully as interest-earning capital. LinkedIn is a vehicle for accelerating this, which is why it has value as a platform for publishing articles etc.
It's also why the spam issue is serious - to the extent it interferes with that platform.
The problem articulated here stems from a confusion between public and professional identities. They’re not the same thing. They involve different kinds of equity. A public identity requires having a reputation and presence. We need to be able to publish, critique, and show up. LinkedIn is a platform.
A professional identity requires relationships and connection. For managing relationships, we need to be able to prune and prioritize people. Avoiding spam is critical. LinkedIn is a connection point. I too use it to find people and try to contact them.
For both purposes, we need aspirational guidance, damage control (dealing with rumors etc.), and the ability to have one place where people can always find us. To the extent LinkedIn offers these transparently, it can monetize them.
It hasn’t, in my view, lost its vision. It’s grappling with the fact that its vision is complicated. And the tools are not always clear. The user interface gets in the way. Is that a trust issue - or just a user experience issue?
Thanks for posting this . I appreciated this essay and the comments. Reply