LinkedIn Problems Run Deeper Than Valuation
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Stray observations: 1. LinkedIn has too many products like sales navigator that attempt to force you through a specific workflow. While it can work, it feels a lot like a misguided tracking system.
2. LinkedIn is most useful as an online resume. Whenever I am meeting someone new or want a refresher, I check LinkedIn. I think everyone does this in North America. This doubles as a useful social sign in tool for biz apps.
3. Older people (40+) in non tech positions respond surprisingly often to InMail. They respond far more often than young techies (who probably get too many messages). This is surprising and extremely useful for my job.
4. LinkedIn needs contact management in context of career. For example: simply stating when you made this contact is crucial.
5. LinkedIn needs a way to show how active a profile is or at least indicate if a profile is no longer responsive. There are millions of LinkedIn profiles that are inactive but LinkedIn encourages you to pay to message them.
6. There needs to be an indicator for how close you are to a specific contact. 99% of the time your mutual contacts are useless. This is especially true for "active users" like myself who see no major disadvantage personally for adding as many contacts as possible.
My whole point is that LinkedIn has an extremely valuable service. It is missing some features and product focus. Many of my above suggestions also help refocus LinkedIn's integrity.
Overall LinkedIn falls into this strange low integrity (in this case, spammy) but somehow successful company. The question is are they going to clean up their act. I think they will.
I think the whole value of connections is diluted otherwise. A connection doesn't mean anything. So that's what I see as the disadvantage of adding as many contacts as possible.
However, if you're looking for talent, it is helpful to have such "connectors" in your network - without those recruiters, when I was doing a check on my network I didn't see some of the people I was trying to hire - this was only the case when I had switched jobs/domains.
I literally have 0 recruiters in my list of contacts.
It does however show the conflict again: recruiters are their bread and butter, so they may want to be careful outing them as people with huge weak networks that appear to be spam nets.
The problem is that the connection feature in LinkedIn covers 2 vastly different use case. What is regular for you ( and me ), a network of people we have worked with and developed a relationship and that overlap your competences in some fashion and eventually become an implicit reference for what you put in your resume. What is regular for recruiter is a network of customer to which you have provided services. You will look at a recruiter connection to double check if he is indeed in contact with all the major investment banks as he pretend, not to double check he indeed worked at company X on project Y in the past.
The weighting should be almost the opposite for a recruiter. If he has worked 5 year in HR in a company 10 years ago, those connections are less interesting that the one he has made in his current position.
Problem is that all the use case are treated the same in linked in and most people mix and match different type of contacts in their connection.
Most people never reply, so I presume they are just trying to bump up their numbers.
That's how connections who you do not personally know - help.
I agree with your overall point that they need to focus their product and drive it forward more than they've done in the past. I have some friends there and from what it sounds like, that's exactly what they're doing.
Re-vamping Groups, re-vamping mobile, cutting out dark patterns (e.g. they've reduced email volume almost 60% I believe through a regulation mechanism that they call Air Traffic Controller).
I think you're using tags, but notes are also a great way to annotate contacts.
Again, I personally don't use these features that much, but I just wanted to point out that they do exist and people can probably get some significant value out of them. Perhaps part of it is a discover problem?
At the end of the day, the CEO is responsible for this mess. He's never at a loss for encouraging buzzwords, but maybe it's time for a change and someone with new vision.
"Spotting the best talent is actually far easier with tools like Talentbin, Stack Overflow, and Github, which aggregate or facilitate positive interactions and allow skilled individuals to display their work — showing why they’re good at what they do."
So that covers technical people, technical people and, er, technical people. What if I want to find a PR Agency? Or a company to refurnish my office?
Yes, but how much? $30BB, where it was last month? What about the $16BB it sits at today?
I think both figures overestimate the value.
Using it as an advertiser is something else altogether. Their advertising interface sucks but holy moly, it's the best business ad targeting platform in the world. People use it, that makes it valuable for advertising - that makes the company valuable. How valuable, not sure - but I think the tech industry doesn't really get LinkedIn so there's a lot of knee jerk bias.
Which is being portrayed as predominately tech-industry, when in reality the tech industry (where stackoverflow and github are relevant) is a small fraction of LinkedIn's market
It serves a few useful purposes:
1 - Before any meeting I look to see if there's something I share in common (person, interest, job, etc) with the other person. This was especially important when I was in Sales.
2 - When I was job hunting, I did a lot of "Look up the job, then see if I knew someone who knew someone at the company" that would've been impossible without it.
3 - I use it for recruiting. The response rate is very low when HR uses it, but as the hiring manager it isn't too bad.
LinkedIn has the highest value users of any service - professionals making good money. If they can figure out good ways to monetize it, they'll blow through their current valuation issues.
My investing strategy has been to invest in large indexes with low expense ratios. For diversification against my human capital, I slightly lean against tech (S&P over Nasdaq) and for personal reasons I try to get some overseas exposure.
I swear the amount of times I wasn't sure if I actually accepted or sent a connection request is way too high. The endorsements are begging to be rigged, and the website is absolutely dismal in terms of social functionality - it pales in comparison to almost every other social media platform.
The only reason it's still popular is because it doesn't need to be any better to do the one thing it does best, which is to be a search engine for recruiters.
That all being said, I maintain an active linkedin profile and I use it regularly.
My sense is that LinkedIn doesn't use endorsements in any other dimension of the site. It's just an engagement tool, so that people are on the site longer. That way they see more ads -- and are perhaps more likely to tweak their profiles.
I personally view those as noise at best and very skeptically at worst -- if someone has a bunch of endorsements for a particular skill I suspect they actually don't know much about it.
I disagree with your reasoning here. While I agree endorsements are useless, I also believe that makes them more or less meaningless. I don't think jumping to conclusions based on endorsements, weather positive or negative, is a good idea.
- one place for contact information
- job offers (most of the ones I receive are relevant)
- being able to "check people out", i.e. see where they have worked before, common contacts etc
I'm in Sweden (if that's relevant). I wrote more about it here: http://henrikwarne.com/2013/08/21/linkedin-good-or-bad/
That and every time I connect with someone or make the mistake of clicking on their emails, I end up with 20 more bloody emails over the next few days for job offers I don't want (drywall contractor this past one, no joke) or people I don't know who are trying to connect with me (most likely recruiters).
I really don't know why I don't delete the thing.
But, then, I'm a consultant, and having people find me is important. A lot of the messages I get are useless--but enough aren't that I effectively don't need to advertise.
There was a study (sorry I can't find the link) few months ago that discussed how spam looks bad intentionally. The idea is to weed out the smart or even average guy and just get the person that are a good target for this kind of con.
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1677...
Edit: Here's a particularly illuminating quote: "By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor."
Accordingly, business attire is not, in fact, business attire, since people are dressed up as people not as businesses.
What a waste of bandwidth...
Similarly, the advice offered by the article was vague pablum. One example:
>The company needs to simplify its number of revenue streams and make sure that they work in concert with its user engagement and growth strategy, rather than in conflict.
Sure. How? Kind of like saying "the company needs to increase revenue by making more money".
You may not agree with that, but that's their logic. It's not quite as tautological as you make it seem.
And that was my point. The author says that LinkedIn needs to find a completely different revenue model in midstream that works for them and that its users love. Do you think there's really a revelation in there? Do you think that's never occurred to LinkedIn (or anyone who's paying attention)?
Making vague and obvious statements as a commentator is also easy. For the article to have value, it should have offered some concrete examples of how these problems could be solved.
You'll also have a hard time using it to change job function or for a career upgrade. If your profile says "Senior Software Engineer" you'll just get a bunch of recruiters spamming you to be "Senior Software Engineer" at some other company. They'll never reach out to you and say, "hey how would you like to try being tech lead, or managing a team of engineers?" The site's obviously automated "suggested jobs" are also carbon copies of whatever it is you're already doing, too.
Needless to say, I don't bother much with LinkedIn anymore.
It is sometimes useful for sales/partnerships. "Who do I know at BigCo, or who do I know who can introduce me to BigCo".
But I'm spending that money grudgingly and always reluctant to upgrade because although it saves me time and effort overall, it also wastes my time every day due to crappy UX, badly implemented SPA type functionality, and hateful mobile experience if you don't want to use their app (LI: I will never use your app if it needs access to my contacts list, particularly given the way you leverage that valuable and private info).
That's a really really stupid position for an incumbent to put themselves in as they will inevitably get their lunch eaten by an upstart at some point.
No doubt LinkedIn is becoming very spammy from all the puzzles and (gasp) personal stuff like 'My son-in-law is having an operation, please pray for him'.
However, the value that most people derive from it and the ease with which you can ignore the spam will keep it being used until there is non-spammy, non-recruiter funded and 'open networking' alternate.
I have connections that are more appropriate than on Facebook because our relationships are professional social not friend social. I don't want their baby pictures & holiday photos but I do want to hear about their business and comment on their business writing.
I like that better than linkedin.
I only joined because my University recommended it but then I found out I liked it.
I see that, but I also don't find any of the critiques particularly egregious.
It's a small data point, but it seems that perhaps there is a negative sentiment growing around LinkedIn.