Late last year I wrote about LinkedIn in the 280 Insider Newsletter. Since then I've invested quite a bit of time and energy in the service, so I thought it would be interesting to do a little reflecting on the experience.
I still think that LinkedIn and the whole concept is a great idea, and since I first wrote about them the team at LinkedIn has done many things right. They've gotten widespread visibility and viral marketing going. They've grown the user base to over a Million. And they've added lots of great new features like checking your outlook address book for others already in the system, associating yourself with groups (I'm tied into SDForum and SVPMA), and being able to quickly find long-lost colleagues who have worked at your previous companies.
When I first started using it I was very excited. I built a network, invested time creating a profile, provided some people with endorsements and told lots of other people about it. After I built my network I made a few requests with mixed results, but I still believed in the vision and general idea. Then I began to get somewhat barraged by email requests via LinkedIn. Because I have a decent network that I am willing to share I got a lot of third-hand and fourth-hand requests from people (most of which were looking for work). I've also gotten a few business development requests for the 280 Group to partner with companies. Lately things have died down - I attribute that to the fact that most of the groups of people I network with joined around the same time, used the service for a while and then got busy with other things.
The challenge that LinkedIn faces is that even as a free service the current cost benefit ratio doesn't make much sense. If I were doing a job search, looking for partnerships deals or looking for consulting clients I would use it. However, as a consultant I have had enough work flowing in for the past year and I do enough other networking and marketing that I haven't needed to use it as a tool for finding new business.
So I'm now in a quandary. I've invested significant time, energy and my reputation in signing up for and helping promote LinkedIn. Yet the only reward I get is receiving emails from people requesting my help. Now I'm all for helping people - I do it all the time because I believe what comes around goes around. However, the way that LinkedIn currently works there is no memory of who has helped who, and I believe that most of the third and fourth hand requests I have facilitated are from people who now don't even remember who I am.
Here are a few ideas that might make LinkedIn more rewarding:
- Create a user reputation. If LinkedIn created user reputations like eBay you could see how much people really help others out. If a person had many refused requests, or had assisted many requests you would get a sense of how much that person might help you in the future. I like to help people that help other people.
- Institute some memory of interactions. Provide an audit trail of who you have helped. That way if I go to use the system later in the future (for something like looking for new consulting clients) I could go back and see who I had done favors for. Who knows - the people I helped might be in a great new job at a company that I want to pitch my services to. NOTE: looking closer at the LinkedIn site later I did find the ability to see all of my interactions that had occurred. However, it would be nice to have a summary by person.
- Provide users with a prompt of urgent opportunities - currently LinkedIn makes you have to do the work to find opportunities or people that are a match. Why not put in some criteria like how urgent the need is and then allow the system to match you with those within one or two rungs of your network that are urgently in need of what you offer. (I'd be quite interested in a system that could email me and let me know that someone very close to my network is looking for an interim Product Manager so that the 280 Group help them out).
- Limit the system to only two hops. The multi-hop system doesn't mimic the way people network in real life. The fact is that if you are more than two hops away there is little difference between you contacting me and someone cold-calling me. This would incent people to build their networks with more closely knit people that they know well and would help eliminate the more random and anonymous requests from others.
I'm sure the LinkedIn team has lots of other great new features they are planning... I just hope that they increase the "What's In It For Me" factor a few notches..
