All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go
thebaffler.com
thebaffler.com
Social networks, Facebook or Google Plus, exist to create a base of knowledge about people, and then sell use of it, usually to advertisers.
Users don't use Facebook in order to be advertised to. They use it to talk to friends, store photos, or possibly to create a low effort website for a business. Yet their value to Facebook is as a target for advertising, and maybe one day their information will be used to provide metrics for insurers and employers.
The highest cost keywords on Google are for payday loans and insurance. In both cases, the money in the industry is in making users buy a product that costs more than it should - if you make money selling payday loans, you are making users with a lower risk profile than the interest reflects buy your loans, rather than go to the bank.
Linkedin users know they are creating a public face that employers, employees, and business partners can use to evaluate them. Linkedin sells access to this data, for the purpose that the users put it up there.
No one posts drunk photos on Linkedin, and if they are complaining about 'spam' from recruiters, they are clearly not looking for a job at the moment (which is what linkedin is for).
Google and Facebook are private surveillance systems that bribe users using unrelated functionality, to document themselves for purposes that are against their interests (making them buy things they otherwise wouldn't, etc). Linkedin provides a publishing platform for users to document themselves and broadcast that documentation. Which one is less evil?
It is true that a large part of the industry is specialized in doing exactly that. However, advertising is also a way to help customers know that your business or product exists and that your offering might be better for them compared to the competition.
This works well on Google, where the long tail is in effect. People are searching for stuff, often because of a certain need they've got. It is being driven by intent. When users search for payday loans or insurance, they are genuinely looking for loans or insurance.
For apps or websites, this might also work well. For example if somebody is interested in losing weight and uses a website or maybe a mobile app that tracks his weight or something - an ad might actually help that person in doing what he wants.
Now, of course, advertising is rarely ranked or served based on quality, with interstitials being won in general by the highest bidder. This often leads to less than optimal suggestions to many customers and some of them might get tricked into getting worse deals than they would otherwise.
But, people shouldn't be as dumb as to stop at the first ad they see, without some research, especially if we're talking about something as important as taking a loan. This is an issue of education - if education is failing us, then pointing fingers at businesses that advertise doesn't help.
For the people "dumb" enough to go to the first ad they see, advertising is taking advantage of them.
For the people who know better, and who will do research, the ads just get in the way.
That said, I think a lot of advertising is deception - you are trying to make the customer believe things that are useful to you, in spite of what they have seen.
For instance, before the MS Surface launched, they spent a lot of money on product placement. In the TV series Dallas, when ever any science or engineering is done, it is done on a Surface, pre-released to the film crew. It does not matter if the Surface is really a good platform for doing science. It matters that the customer thinks 'innovation, science, business, profit, Surface'. What is true does not matter.
The surface pro is actually a cool thing, and I hear students love them. Perhaps the above deception will help them succeed - deception is not necessarily evil, if it helps move people to a place where they can make a better decision.
Generally, if a user is looking for your service (Payday Loan), then they are already intending to buy that product, and adwords bids or SEO decide which competitors they will choose between. This is the opposite to a comparison site that genuinely helps a user find the best product for them (and insurance friends tell me comparison sites have decimated profit in that industry).
But more dangerously, SEO and adwords can make a user searching for 'moonlighting jobs' or 'how to get out of debt' see Payday Loans as an option, where the highest quality advice would actually be to negotiate with their bank, and maybe get a bigger overdraft.
Obviously, the evil in the above example is Payday Loans, and not advertising.
But the case I make, for the evil of google, is that the most money is made (advertising has the greatest effect) when it causes people to take bad decisions. Google make money most from helping make people make bad decisions.
This article isn't about the spam or the endorsements, but rather about its network effects, with its roots lying in the "positive-thinking industry", a pyramid of salesmen for snake-oil following the model of Dale Carnegie, a man who never influenced anybody until he wrote his famous book.
It is a rather interesting perspective of which I never thought about before.
I believe LinkedIn can achieve much more than that by creating an application store similar to Google's and Apple's. where 3rd party apps can be listed, featured and installed and billed in a recurring or per-request basis.
Through a LinkedIn app store, 3rd parties can bring a lot of innovative functionality to LinkedIn.
A B2B sales rep has been sued for their LinkedIn account after leaving the company, posting an "update" and being argued that this construed "stealing" away past clients.
My Google-fu is failing me to find the source, apologies. I dug into this long ago when switching companies who had mandatory LinkedIn usage, etc.
1) If I'm trying to find someone in a very specific role, for a very specific reason, LinkedIn tells me who I need to go through to get there. This isn't always job hunting.
2) If I have a meeting or a call with someone, I check them out in LinkedIn for a quick bio.
These two use cases justify my having an account, investing time in building my network, and encourage me to put up with the spam.
There's a 3rd use case, which is recruiting. LinkedIn is likely as useful and current as any headhunter's internal database. This should make smart recruiter's jobs a little bit easier.
I got the job, he got the referral bonus. Double win. Maybe we'd still get it without LinkedIn but one sure thing is that LI made it very fast and convenient.
My biggest gripe about LinkedIn is the utility of LinkedIn _goes down_ when you're logged in. Google searches of LinkedIn (when you're logged out) are far better than the logged into LinkedIn searches (because they limit your searches that are "out of your network.")
I routinely open private windows and search LinkedIn with Google. Finally, another use for porn-mode.
However, the good parts still dominate for me: updated contact-list of my professional contacts, on-line resume, highly relevant job ads, and the occasional "good" recruiter. I just recently wrote a blog post about this: http://henrikwarne.com/2013/08/21/linkedin-good-or-bad/
It takes effort to recommend a colleague, to compose a couple of lines of text that represent what you think about him or his work. That's why they came up with those shitty endorsements. And when looking at profiles, these recommendations is what I search for.
Of course, the system is gamed a little, as these recommendations are often reciprocal (e.g. "give me a recommendation and I'll also give you one"). But on the other hand, when recommending somebody, your reputation is on the line, so for example I never recommended somebody whose work I didn't like.
So yes, it's useful as an online resume. But it's also annoying to get countless of notifications from clueless recruiters that didn't even bother to do keyword matching on your profile.
And it goes the other way too. Whenever I'm confronted with a list of skills for people in my network I don't know whether they put them there or it's the site's idea. So you don't know what to endorse and what not, you may end up looking a completely ass or just someone who endorses everything just to be on the good side.
It's like the whole damn site was build to fool people around and to promote lying.
I really hope they'll redesign this feature, as it is freaking annoying.
Surely that's the point of how endorsements should work? Do you know that this person is skilled in Fooing Bars? Then endorse them. Otherwise, don't.
If you don't know whether the site or the user added the skill, it suggests you don't know enough to endorse them for that particular skill.
> It's like the whole damn site was build to fool people around and to promote lying.
Agreed. I'm sure the whole endorsements system at least was built to generate spam and click-throughs. Fortunately, almost everyone recognises it for what it really is - a pointless click-fest with no real value in deciding which skills someone has.
It is easy to say that, yet the site is designed in such a way (and one has to assume this is purposefully so) that it is very easy to endorse people for random things by way of the 4-person grid in which one of the options is "endorse all".
Based on my own experience with being endorsed for random things, it seems to be pretty common for people to just keep banging that button to 'help' out their friends with a bent towards just giving them the benefit of the doubt that they must know whatever the topic is if linkedin is suggesting they do in the first place (and it is tangentially related to their industry).
Except I never claimed that I was skilled in .Net, LinkedIn suggested it.
But yeah, the execution is so horrid that it reeks of malice.
I get a few mails every month/week about some potential job that I might qualify for, and most of the time the job content is pretty in tune with what I want to do. So LinkedIn costs me nothing, but does offer me value. I don't see why closing my account would be liberating.
It's a one-sided perspective of achievement as it does not show the failures of a person.
There's a charm in not bragging so much about your achievements and instead admitting we're all imperfect. The people I met that have achieved the most in life hardly bragged about it nor did they have "all-star" LinkedIn profiles.
There's nothing wrong in outlining your achievements and it is quite necessary if you're looking for a job, or if you're a consultant looking for clients, or if your startup died and you're looking for a new adventure and so on.
LinkedIn is first and foremost a repository of online resumes. Resumes are by definition marketing pamphlets.
> The people I met that have achieved the most in life hardly bragged about it
If you pay attention, you'll realize there's a selection bias going on. The successful people you've met, are probably those whose achievements are known by everybody in their field. This is probably why you've met them in the first place.
Like, when I go to a conference and I see somebody I know to be a really good developer based on my interactions with him on mailing lists or his open-source projects or the startups he worked on (or other such criteria), I do want to shake his hand and say hi. I have less such inclinations for people I know nothing about and I suspect my behaviour is not atypical.
However, many people don't have achievements that are known. Many people may have done wonderful stuff and yet nobody will ever know about it, unless they tell their tale. And yet this is precisely what they need to do for growing in their careers, for getting to work on interesting stuff, for getting higher incomes and so on.
I appreciate modesty, but sometimes it's not a virtue. Knowing how to market yourself is a necessity and yet engineers are really, really bad at doing it.
I've since changed jobs to one with a less pretentious (I suppose it was a self-imposed "demotion") title and I'm getting the "old" kind of recruiter spam again.
It's also a good way to find people who have some connection to you (alumni of same school, worked at same job, etc) who might be a few years ahead career wise that you can reach out to for advice. In particular, older people might be on Linked-In and not Facebook.
Would some please tell me WHAT THE FUCKING OBSESSION WITH 8 POINT FONTS AND HIGHLY MUTED COLORS EVERYWHERE IS?
LinkedIn's blogs are actually not too horribly done. Font isn't full black, it's #333 (that's enough to be problematic on some screens), but at least it's a full 20px, which I can actually read. And while the columns are narrow for my taste at 650px or so (I prefer around 900-950px, or 40-45em) they're at least not horribly skinny.
For the main sight, text is rendered as light as #a9a9a9 (that's a very light grey), and most of it's around 12-14px. The main content field is around 300px wide (1/3 what I'd prefer). It literally hurts my eyes to look at the page.
And you know what I do to webpages that hurt my eyes? I close them.
Then some trend-addled idiot throws it away with his "tasteful", "artistic" color scheme.
I can't speak for all Influencers authors but Jeff Weiner in particular has a great and realistic commentary style while speaking person and to the employees at LinkedIn. It's a shame as I read the both "Managing Compassionately" and "Three Pieces of Career Advice That Changed My Life" that neither has the same impact compared to hearing those points as answers to difficult questions.
As a fan of the slow-web I would like to see Influencer articles find a sweet spot between timely and long-form. For example, a lot of the posts give good information but don't weave that information into a memorable narrative of when and how to apply said advice.
This allows me to find out which nefarious bastard is spamming me.
One kind recruiter agreed to settle a handling fee for £220 for 220 emails sent to me over a year.
(I don't use recruiters these days but they have a habit of trying to use me still)
Of course, no privacy settings make any difference when the recruiters offer prizes to your friends if their recommendation leads to a placement. iPads are often given away around here in exchange for contact details if they lead to a hiring.
No one had.