Zane and I must be on the same wavelength. Here I am typing up a post on LinkedIn and he goes and posts about LinkedIn and using social websites for business (more on the latter in Q1 2007 :).
I for one am slowly going the way of Scoble and am very close to dropping LinkedIn, although that is not entirely possible. Why? It provides little value, at least for me.
The only ’social’ aspect I have garnered from this service is the ability to ‘connect’ to other people through people. That’s cool. I personally do not like this interaction to be automated as it is the heart of personal social interaction. Is someone more likely to do business with me if they are my contact on LinkedIn or if a mutual colleague says, “Hey, you should email Andy – he can solve all your web problems!”? I would bet the latter. And I would rather meet clients in this fashion than getting “LinkedIn”.
LinkedIn has done plenty for me thus far. I get a range of job offers from all over the country doing all kinds of things. Essentially it has become a free marketing list for IT recruiters. I am in Iowa and I am a technologist and web architect primarily in Microsoft technologies – why do I care that you have an opening in Toronto for a PHP developer that requires relocation? The answer is – I don’t. LinkedIn has become a spam-bot.
If someone needs to keep in contact with me or view my resume, they can online. I have had the same email, website, and phone number for about five years now. I will own my personal domain forever. People can refer me to others via this connection. Hasn’t that been the case of business networking since the beginning of business networking?
I like what Jeff Atwood has to say:
“Has this service ever been useful to anyone? I’m telling you, Linked In is the digital equivalent of a chain letter. If you really want to contact a friend of a friend (of a friend), just pick up the phone or send an email. If the only way you can reach someone is through this nutty online social pyramid scheme, you don’t deserve to be taken seriously. And I can guarantee that you won’t be
Consider carefully: who really benefits from your participation in Linked In? I’ll tell you who benefits: Linked In.”
Can you give me good reasons on how this service can create value for me … or how it creates value to you?
Related:
Linking Out after Two Years of Linked In
LinkedIn: Can’t we talk about this first?
Tags: LinkedIn, Business, Social Networks
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree with you here. I’ve had linked in for some time now, and in no way have I benefited from it. It’s like a sad attempt to be a professional social networking site.
I think there is an excellent opportunity for a professional social networking site to emerge and easily differentiate themselves.
This Week in Tech just did a fair bit of LinkedIn bashing as well. I guess Leo Laporte gets 3 invites a day.
Isn’t this the bane of all social sites, though? Popular people will get inundated by requests from everyone else? Facebook and MySpace suffer the same problem.
That said, I’ve personally found it useful to see where former colleagues have landed and what they’re doing. The details on LinkedIn are usually more precise than I’d get in a casual email.
Yes – I’ve found that maintaining a contact list of true colleagues is a beneficial tool. I’ve read of many people who do not accept invites from people that they haven’t worked with – which makes sense.
Yeah, it is the inherent nature of a social network. It’s tends to turn into a popularity contest.