End of LinkedIn?

I took part in the panel on social media at Informs2010 this morning and, among the many fascinating insights that were exchanged, Wayne Winston from the Indiana School of Business (who writes a blog on math and sports called mathletics, in addition to being the author of many operations research books that have become ubiquitous at universities around the country) made the comment that, (I paraphrase), if anyone bothered to take on LinkedIn, they could crush them the way Facebook crushed MySpace. I completely agree, and hope maybe some entrepreneurship-inclined students out there will take on the challenge.

I have a LinkedIn page, but have found the site to be very static, and not helpful in building a network. This is an issue I would expect college students or young graduates to struggle more with, since they are the ones set to benefit the most from having a network for their job search. I only link to people I know, and I do appreciate the notifications as to what people in my network are up to, but the structure is very barebones and I have so far failed to see the value of LinkedIn groups. In other words, I find the current LinkedIn website to fall very far short of its stated goal to "strengthen and extend your existing network of trusted contacts" and "help you discover inside connections."

What are features you think a business-network site should have? I guess people should be able to, in addition to posting their resume (which LinkedIn already does through the profile function) present some sort of portfolio of their work if they want to describe recent projects in more details, post links to multimedia links or news releases about their work or expertise, engage in public or private discussions with other users, and in general offer more opportunities for frequent updating. Relationships between people who link to each other would benefit from being clearer (who do you interact with on a frequent basis? who do you link to because you knew them in graduate school ten years ago?)

A mentoring/advising feature would be welcome as well - for instance, they could check off a box saying "I am willing to give insights by email into my industry/company/job function to people who are X links away from me in my network". An industry leader could be profiled at regular intervals and share his/her perspective about how he/she made it to the top. It should make it easy for companies to identify users who have worked with a potential hire in the past (maybe people should give the names of five people they have worked closely with and the dates of interaction whenever they add a work position to their profile - people would not give the names of teammates they did not get along with, but a good algorithm would look at who else the people they named are connected with and would produce the names of these potential acquaintances as well). The site could be financed via advertising by, say, higher education programs (especially continuing education or executive education), although companies could also pay a small fee to post job openings and the like.

Also, I would like to suggest the heretic idea of not displaying, ever, the number of connections users have (don't even make it an option.) A lot of people out there love the feeling of being popular and, as has become clear on Facebook and even more so on Twitter, will try very hard to increase whatever number their popularity is measured by. They follow others on Twitter with the sole goal of getting followed, although their Twitter feed is usually only a list of retweets and links to ways to increase one's followers, and usually stop following within a few days if the other party doesn't promptly follow them back. A successful business-network site should be built on the premises that the quality of connections counts a lot more than their quantity, and that you do not need to have 500 connections to be a powerbroker (although of course, it doesn't hurt either).

A good business-network site should also assist companies in identifying applicants who have padded their resume or glossed over bad work experiences. Think about the PR drama that unfolded when Skype hired an engineering executive at Yahoo!, unleashing a storm of negative comments on social-media sites (especially techcrunch.com); this ultimately resulted in the Yahoo! alumnus leaving Skype after a month. Better reference-checking on Skype's end would have helped avoid putting it under a negative spotlight - at the very least, it would have been aware of potential problems before the social-media storm. A networking site that could help companies identify good people to contact for references, and applicants find good sources of advice as they try to find a foothold in an industry, would be invaluable. This would require users to volunteer quite a bit of data (something the Millenium generation has become increasingly comfortable with), and operations researchers to implement good algorithms to sort through this data. Maybe the next Facebook success story will be built on analytics.

Comments

[Charles Indelicato]

Some of the things you look for may already be available on LinkedIn, through their applications.

A presentation of work can be shown either by Google Presentation or SlideShare, and Creative Portfolio Display can feature a more graphics-rich layout. The concept of the 'mentoring/advising feature' you suggest exists in the Contact Settings under "Interested In", but it is requires a better focus and a search tool to be more useful.

I agree - wholeheartedly - with your suggestion to keep the number of connections private. I, for one, am unimpressed when people boast the numbers of contacts they have; there's a point of diminishing returns in networking credibility when the number of contacts reaches a certain point. Arguably that point can vary in the individual, but I believe it is safe to say several-hundred qualifies.

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http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=application_directory

[Aurelie Thiele]

Charles - thanks a lot for the comment! Great points. I doubt people will bother learning about the more advanced features of LinkedIn unless the site gets a do-over and a sleeker look. It looks so basic right now that users expect it to only have the basic features that go with the barebones look.

I would also want the site to ask a bit more information about how long users have known their connections and in which capacity, how they rate the link between them (from weak to strong), etc, for it to become more useful. Email systems could play a role - after all, Gmail already has Priority Inbox; it could easily assign a "strength factor" to connections in an address book based on frequency of emails. That would prevent users from gaming the system by pretending they interact closely with every single one of their 500+ connections.

[Orinanobworld.blogspot.com]

I found the discussion of LinkedIn interesting (as was the session overall). None of the panelists seemed happy with LinkedIn, but I also got no specific sense of what it was you all wanted (other than "better interface"). I'll confess that I signed up for LinkedIn with no particular goal in mind, and it has done perfectly fine meeting that nonexistent goal. :-) I only check in when I get a request to link, or when it pings me about a potentially interesting discussion (which is seldom), but I'm not sure what it could do that I would find more useful. (Disclaimer: I'm nearing the 18th hole career-wise, so I'm not looking to build a network of potential future employers.)

Since we're OR types, maybe we should start by assessing the objectives, then start looking for a solution. What do we collectively want from LinkedIn (or the "LinkedIn Killer" mentioned in the session)?

[Aurelie Thiele]

Thanks for your comment! My main issues with LinkedIn are:
(1) there is a wide range of strength between connections, and the system doesn't let you differentiate between "strong" and "weak" ones, or even say for how long you've known another user,
(2) it's too static - there is little incentive to go to the site regularly and I don't find the discussions particularly interesting. Many users log into Twitter or even Facebook several times a week (some people even log into Twitter several times a day), while the content on LinkedIn isn't updated often enough to warrant that kind of repeated use.