LinkedIn has a lot going for it. It won the gold medal in 2011’s IPOs and now boasts more than 175 million users. It’s branched out to more than 200 countries and avoided the awkward missteps that have bedeviled its social rival, Facebook. It reported record earnings for last quarter, and its stock price is near its peak. Anecdotally, a few of my department heads use it successfully to place job ads.
My golf buddy, a senior developer at a Fortune 500 company, commented that a year or two back people kept on asking him if he was on LinkedIn. He’d answer by saying, “No, if I were linked in to anything else I wouldn’t get anything done. Now if there’s a LinkedOut product somewhere, I’d like to know about it.”
Amen I say. Myself, I was lucky enough to change my email address on LinkedIn about a year ago to an account that I never check and have since forgotten. Those extra 10 minutes of reduced spam each day give me more time to work, work out, and be with the family.
However, I wish I had been as careful for my employees as I was with myself. The fact is however that I made a major goof at my company a while back regarding LinkedIn. I let the idea get floated that LinkedIn could improve the perception of our company to the outside when the actually it has cost us dearly in employee productivity.
The mistake I made was to let some of the LinkedIn fans in the company encourage the employee base to join. Our logic was that by broadening the public exposure of our staff we would connect better with our prospects and job candidates and give off an aura of stability. After all, in business and in the software business in particular, perception plays an outsized role in the prospect’s decision making process in comparison to product quality or customer service. Yeah it’s a shame but it’s true.
And because LinkedIn has become the de facto standard for connecting professionally, it’s a natural place to create perception. Not only that, LinkedIn has done an outstanding job of formatting personal profiles in an attractive way. Company ones too. Kudos to them on design.
But here’s the fatal flaw in our logic. By getting those employees to sign up on LinkedIn, we’ve exposed them to a constant stream from spammers. Recruiters, viagra salesmen, email list vendors. You name it.
Before you take offense to me including recruiters in that list, let me say I’m not talking about well thought out approaches from real recruiters. I’m talking about email bombing from job shops from Skookumchuck to Visakhapatman.
So I’m paying the price for our posturing. Fortunately for me, most of my employee base, independent minded devs that they are, ignored our request to join LinkedIn.
I’m curious to see how this plays out over the next year. Will LinkedIn, now a public company that needs to demonstrate hockey stick growth, get even less selective on who it sells its email list and contact information to?
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
LinkedIn is a great way to connect with people. Especially if you met them, but never got a business card. If you use the network to actually communicate with people then it works out pretty well. If people just set up an account and do nothing with it, then all they’re going to get out of it is spam. It’s like any social network — you get out of it what you put in. People in sales, media and marketing get a lot more out of it then developers I’m sure.
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Paul, that’s the spin on it from the social network itself and at the beginning you’re right it does work out that way. However, as the network expands as LinkedIn and others have, the positive result you’re describing reaches a point of diminishing returns and the negative aspects take off, like a virus.
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I would expand on Paul’s comments and say that the benefit of LinkedIn is directly affected by what type of role you are in and how you set up your profile.
In Gregg’s company, putting out profiles of software developers is akin to telling your team to post resumes to Monster and Dice. Recruiters rule the roost on LinkedIn, and are constantly checking for talent. But, for recruiting and sales professionals, it is a great platform to create visibility for open roles and to actively engage with job seekers that are passive and active.
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Him Tim…very akin to putting the resumes on Dice. Identical in fact. And I have recruited successfully on LinkedIn myself so point well taken.
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Interesting, I have been on LinkedIn from the very beginning, with multiple email addresses. Never had any kind of spam problem that I could connect to it.
No matter, my point does not challenge your analysis. You raise an interesting question. I guess we will see how much control individuals (participating in social networks) will retain over their own “profile identities” and related information in the future.
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Hi Andrew…thanks for the comment … it does make me wonder what it is on my profile that attracts the spam.
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It’s interesting that while you have rebuked both Facebook (in an earlier article) and LinkedIn, your company continues to use them for purposes of marketing and recognition. I have to agree with you (slightly), however, that using these “social sites” has a way of sapping productivity. On the other hand, I do think that if used strategically, the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages. The challenge is to find a way to leverage these sites and use the advantages they provide and prevent the productivity hits.
Interesting article. Thanks.
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Although you’re right about the irony, where I really feel I’m letting the team down is not fully getting them on board to news ways – beyond LinkedIn and Facebook – to interact that can deliver many times the advantages yet keep control of the spam and not impact productivity.
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I would like to comment as well that I haven’t had any issues with spam. LinkedIn has been immensely useful! The networking potential is astronomical! The ability to reach out to qualified candidates, expand your reach, and create a presence for yourself are all feasible with LinkedIn if you use it strategically. It may not be advantageous to everyone, considering not everyone recruits the same way; but to dismiss it entirely is a mistake. I should mention that there are filters for email (within LinkedIn, not sure if you’re aware).
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