Myth #1: LinkedIn Will Find You a Job
You’ve heard how you should use your network to find a job and how LinkedIn makes that easy, but making LinkedIn a cornerstone is a major mistake.
Yes the tools are nice. It’s easy to get your name out there with it. But employers have had it up to their ears with spammy LinkedIn requests, and the amount of garbage emanating from the site risks putting you in a category of desperate. Nothing says I’m unemployed and clueless more clearly than a poorly constructed Linkedin connection.
Nothing says I’m unemployed and clueless more clearly than a poorly constructed Linkedin connection.
Here’s how one hiring manager put it:
People need to utilize resources rather than rely on them. My problem with Linkedin is that it is flooded with the masses and genuine conversation, real debate on any subject in staffing is rarely achieved.
Myth #2: LinkedIn Will Find You Customers
Although LinkedIn offers an array of content generation tools like company pages and product or service pages, this amounts to little more than another place to get eyeballs on the web.
You can get those eyeballs in so many ways – adwords, blogging, good website design, Yammer, Yelp, bookmarking sites – that to focus your efforts on just one tool like LinkedIn is marketing suicide.
When I see a company with little presence beyond LinkedIn, my immediate thought is that they don’t have the creativity or momentum to create a presence of their own on a web property that they own and control.
When I see a company with little presence beyond LinkedIn, my immediate thought is that they don’t have the creativity or momentum to create a presence of their own on a web property that they own and control.
One more aspect of the LinkedIn customer acquisition myth is that by requesting connections there you can build up a network that leads to sales. This used to be true and still may be true to a tiny extent, but again it’s the spam, the flooding of unhelpful information there that has rendered LinkedIn into another MySpace.
Myth #3: The LinkedIn IPO Was Successful
When I raise these issues (spam, etc) with LinkedIn aficionados, they counter that if what I were saying were true then LinkedIn’s IPO wouldn’t have been so successful. Well here’s the truth: no one knows if the IPO was successful.
So few shares were offered through the IPO that the public was given the false impression that overall ownership of LinkedIn was highly sought after. This was a smart tactic. Creating the illusion of scarcity is always a smart tactic if you’re selling something.
Creating the illusion of scarcity is always a smart tactic if you’re selling something.
Meanwhile in a few short weeks, the masses of LinkedIn employees and investors that have been restricted from selling their shares are about to be let loose. As of this writing, LinkedIn is down more than 20% in the last few weeks, a period of overall market gain.
When the witching hour comes, when the 180 day lockout period ends, only then we’ll be sure of what the market really thinks of the IPO.
