The Weak Link
I’ve found my experiment as Guru of Social Media on Linkedin to be fascinating, but sort of like eating taffy—it’s flavorful, but always on the verge of too much trouble.
Here are the pros thus far:
• People are overwhelmingly polite and respectful. Much better than some of the blogger entries I’ve seen (and we’ve had to delete here).
• When you post a question, you get thoughtful answers with some surprisingly interesting viewpoints and facts, and even those who disagree are generally constructive.
• People who know me tangentially and peripherally can create a closer relationship.
• I guessed, and chose to spend $500 for the year, which I consider reasonable.
Here are the cons:
• The technology is so stunningly primitive that I felt as if I want to fire my web administrator, until I realize I can’t control that! It is slow and unreliable.
• The aesthetics are laughably awful.
• The claims are bizarre. I’m “connected” somehow to nearly a million people at the moment, according to the system. (Can I ask each of them for a dollar?)
• The tight focus on jobs, past employment, and finding employment I believe is too narrowing.
• The greatest and weakest “link”: The ROI is highly questionable. You can spend hours a day on this gizmo with very little return, especially compared with other marketing (or even networking) efforts of higher quality.
I’ll continue to mess around, and you’re all invited to join me, simply state “Alan’s Blog” in your invitation or acceptance or whatever, so that I know you’re not a serial killer (Well, I really wouldn’t know that, would I?).
For those in the Mentor Program, there is a special Mentor Group I’ve formed. There are 20 people in it, and I have no idea how I did that or how they got in there or how to use it, but we’re all working on that!
One final stunner: There was, for a while, a bizarro world Linkedin with a bizarr0 Alan, only 25% complete, as though I hadn’t been there for a week. Then I signed out and signed back in, and bizarro world disappeared, and my full profile reappeared. Maybe Linkedin connects to another universe entirely. Not THAT’S networking!
© 2008 Alan Weiss. All rights reserved.
Gareth Kane
I’m in two minds about LinkedIn: I haven’t had an ROI yet, but I know people in the same sector as me who have with little or no effort – so I keep a presence and try not to spend too much time there.
Ed Kless
I am with you 100% on social media. Mega dittos as the Limbaughites (Limbaughnians, perhaps) say.
LinkIn has been somewhat helpful in finding old friends, so therefore I have seen some benefit. The one I can’t figure out is Twitter.
Anyone out there using it?
Laurent Duperval
I use it once in a while. Sometimes it’s just a little comment like the type of thing you put in a Facebook status.
Recently, though, I have started putting links to my blog posts and other things I do that appear on the Web. Not sure whether it works or not, but it can’t hurt if I don’t spend more than a minute or two a couple of times a day.
L
Lisa Braithwaite
I’m enjoying the Q&A feature, and I’ve also reconnected with a lot of old friends. Still not sure about the benefits to my business, but as the other commenters have said, it might be worth adding to my online presence if it’s not taking too much time away from other things.
Kelly Eric Frigstad
I believe that LinkedIn may prove more beneficial in the future if people start to gather recommendations that are well written and they can be used as “proof statements”. Once the recommendations are available the site can be used by prospective clients as a method of checking references.
But this still assumes that customers will be using tools such as this to look for services, and I am not convinced that customers will do this.
Ed Kless
@ Laurent, Lisa and Kelly – Thanks for your thoughts.
Bob Smiley
I use LinkedIn as a contact manager to help me keep up with friends and colleagues and their current contact information. I’m not disciplined enough to do that on my own. I haven’t really found any ROI for it, but then I don’t spend anything on it either. I have yet to figure out how to make those types of sites work for me for anything other than just giving search engines more data to collect to spam me with.
LinkedIn is what I was hoping Classmates or Reunion.com would be, but with LinkedIn I can actually make contact with the other person instead of just see them on a website.
I’ve tried the Q&A feature and got some good responses. Also, a colleague of ages past sent out a job request, I made an introduction, and lo and behold they got hired! So that was pretty cool.
Ash Waechter
For the most part, Linked in has not really helped me in a direct business sense (for example, no one has called me up and said, “Hey, Ash, I saw you on Linked in. Why don’t you design my website and here’s a bunch of money.”) That hasn’t happened. I’m sure of it.
But Linked in has helped me reconnect with a lot of old friends which in turn has helped with some business aspects. I other words, a friend I reconnected with introduced me to one of my current clients. So, I guess in that sense, it works.
Thanks
-Ash
Lisa Braithwaite
One thing I should have mentioned is that having a presence on LinkedIn has also helped my Google ranking. On any given day, I’m somewhere between #1 and #5 on Google for “public speaking coach,” both for my blog and my website. In that sense, it’s a big help to my business, as I get many of my clients from Google.
Guy Kawasaki wrote a great post here on ten ways to use LinkedIn: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/ten_ways_to_use.html