LinkedIn Needs To Re-Think Its Plans

Great stuff here Chris. LinkedIn frustrates me a little also! I work with professionals and their personal brands, and really look forward to the day that LI gets it’s mix right! Do you have any contact with the people running the business? I am wondering how much they listen to their constituents and other social media buzz?

I also believe that LinkedIn is sitting on a big bucket of potential, but is very confused as to what they want to be when they grow up. The fact they think they’re going to be your business news hub is completely broken. I think they could do a lot more to help you connect to peers and potential partners or customers, and they’re not doing anything there. What if they partnered with Salesforce.com and helped you better find prospects? They’re no Facebook and they should stop trying to be.

I also believe that LinkedIn is sitting on a big bucket of potential, but is very confused as to what they want to be when they grow up. The fact they think they’re going to be your business news hub is completely broken. I think they could do a lot more to help you connect to peers and potential partners or customers, and they’re not doing anything there. What if they partnered with Salesforce.com and helped you better find prospects? They’re no Facebook and they should stop trying to be.

@Louis – right there, you’ve nailed a perfect partnership. Imagine if LI could dig into my contacts and see trends as to who my potential partners, buyers, and sellers might be. Hell, Facebook tries all damned day to tell me who my friends might be (so does LI). Why not help me find business threads, too?

I write more about this in a different way a little later in the week.

I wholeheartedly agree with you Chris. I have been a member for a few years now. (I think it was actually the first social network I joined.) And now have over 7000 direct connections (and often get many unexpected errors because of what a LI employee said: I have too many connections).

They have come some way in helping recruiters and they made a great decision to implement Q&A. (I make good connections thru Q&A.)

But if they are looking to monetize something maybe they should look into making it easier for people to trust others and verify what is on their profile. You always have to wonder in the back of your mind: is this person really who they say they & have they done what they say they have done?

There could be 2 sources of revenue there, especially if they make it reasonably priced. The person that wants to get some info verified can pay some nominal amount to get their info verified and the person that wants to see others credentials could pay to be shown other’s verified credentials.

It would be a great source especially if you are trying to consumate business deals across the world. Some sort of verification could make a difference. (I know it would for me.)

The best thing about this is that LinkedIn does not have to do it themselves. They just create a LI apps (see facebook) platform that plugs in and boom, they will have many developers (from individuals to companies) building apps.

LinkedIn has the opportunity to possibly create a very successful marketplace! (I’ll take my royalties via direct deposit please! B-D)

BTW, I am not an LI employee. I just happen to like LI.

Right on Chris! A friend of mine used to work exclusively with LinkedIn but now has started pursuing a “more effective” process. Said their potential was amazing, but did not seem to have the connection process anywhere as effective as it could or should be. I agree-Partnership seems to be something that could dramatically accelerate their growth if they would be open to it. Salesforce.com would be a great start and is a powerful idea. Great post.

Brilliant! Leverage the Salesforce.com platform.

Then oracle will buy salesforce & LI. Imagine Oracle with a social network! :) They’ve got forums down pact. :)

got carried away there…but still leveraging an existing platform would be the least painful way.

I like LI and am in no way affiliated – beyond having a profile and a few contacts there.

Although it is my favorite networking platform, I also share many of the views expressed here and I love the idea of making verification easier. Not too sure about paying for it though. A means of verification of pro credentials seems like a reasonable baseline feature to expect (otherwise, doesn’t this become just another prospecting list for spammers & recruiters at some point?).

Also, my comment on your earlier post was something to the effect of “The best way to improve LI is to just stave off the sucky features of other social networks”.

Maybe that wasn’t clear enough, how about this: “Don’t sell out and make it an ad platform.”

Or this: “Please don’t invite every pasty-faced code jockey to exploit the rich data supplied by your users. Be a little selective and make it about the *user* experience.”

It’s great to build a kick-a## service, and it’s wonderful to see it grow. But those two things happen by different mechanisms: the founders do the building, but the users are responsible for the growth.

Maybe LI doesn’t remember what it was like before they were “bigger than Sweden”. I actually read that, or some similar statement, in one of their tag lines. Imagine how inferior that must make Sweden feel. Heck, if they are bigger than Sweden maybe they can buy Yahoo! and incorporate Flickr, Upcoming, etc.

Oops my sarcastic evil twin came out. It really is my favorite, so I shouldn’t bash.

Regardless of LI developments, I hope you do go ahead with your idea of building a professional network and migrating your contacts over. I’m with you whenever you do. Why? Because based on what I’ve seen, you understand value creation for the user, you are guided by a desire for ever improving quality, and you seem hesitant to exploit trust relationships. There are lots of great possibilities with this!

_The Tipping Point_ talks about how a person is limited to around 150-300 stable relationships. LI engineers probably didn’t have a clue that people would have thousands of direct relationships.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

Just curious, how many people are in your total LI network? I’ve got about 200 direct connections. (I appreciate you being one of them.) LI says I’m connected to 2,344,600+ professionals. Wondering how this compares.

Chris, this is exactly why we built VendorCity (http://www.VendorCity.com). LinkedIn is great in many ways but they are not really servicing the needs of most small and medium-sized businesses. For most business owners, networking means finding warm sales opportunities and finding really great partners / vendors to help you business be successful. LinkedIn just doesn’t do a good job of that.

@Allen – I have over 2500 or so, but I work at it.

I also agree with you on this and with several of the comments above. I am an LinkedIn Open Networker with 4,000+ direct connections. I use LinkedIn to let people know about my small business and also to expand my friends’ networks (I don’t just say that, I probably forward 5 to 10 introductions per week.)

For the past two months (once I passed the 3,500 mark), I started getting error messages while performing the most mundane of tasks. I’ve heard from others with large networks that LI says its because of the size of our networks – so basically, we are at fault!

There has been a growing thread on the Yahoo! LIONs group that dissects the issues and also proposes numerous solutions.

LI is my favorite social networking site because it is for professionals. There is so much potential there. I’d hate to see them go the way of Friendster. Increased advertising is not one of them.

Hi Chris,

Saw this post today, and just wanted to clarify a few things. To be clear, the presentation at GSP East was not intended as an end-to-end walkthrough of the LinkedIn strategy or opportunity. The conference was specifically geared towards social media, so the presentation was specifically about LinkedIn and it’s relevance for advertising and as an application platform.

So, to make sure I answer your last question:

“Chris, this is just one stop on the way to application greatness, and not the plan.”

I hope that you will be both surprised & delighted with a number of the enhancements we plan for LinkedIn. It’s just the beginning.

Hope this helps,
Adam

@Adam – thanks for stopping by and indulging my silly misunderstandings.

Everyone else- that’s how cool LinkedIn is. They swing by blogs and indulge my silly misunderstandings.

Adam – Brief me, baby. Share the strategy. I want to sing.

Allen St. Clair, you hit it on the head. Dunbar’s number though is the reason why people don’t do more business off LinkedIn. You’ve exhausted the opportunity in your personal network. You need to connect with new people and new potential customers to find commercial opportunity, but LI limits this process by degrees of separation.

Ditto Allen & Lief!

Thanks for the kind words, Chris.

Always happy to share, but be careful what you wish for. You get that NDA on you, and then there is less fun to be had. :)

Feel free to reach out to Mario or myself anytime.
Adam

Okay, if money making is just a side opportunity, cool, but if this is the big strategy between now and 2009? Screw it. I’ll go make a professional social network, use all my resources to beg, borrow, and deliver value to people formerly in my LI network, and see if I can’t make something bigger happen than what seems to be lacking over in the land of blue wizards.