Industry white papers, in general, are dull reading—unless you need a piece of information in one of them to do your job. Then you’ll pay almost anything (i.e. expense it) to get your hands on the white paper you need. Sometimes companies produce white papers and give them away for free, but they have a hard time finding the professionals who might be interested in whatever narrow topic the paper covers.
Enter LinkedIn. It knows what industry you work in and your job title, making it easy to guess what kinds of white papers you might actually be interested in. The business networking site is testing a new feature that turns white papers into ads and presents them to the narrow group of professionals most likely to want to read them. LinkedIn members can get white papers for free, and in return sponsors get qualified leads.
A few hours ago, CEO Reid Hoffman sent out a Tweet saying that he “downloaded my first whitepaper from Linkedin.” He linked to this white paper from VMware and Intel titled “VMware vSphereâ„¢ and Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series: Delivering the IT Infrastructure of Tomorrow – Today.” (You can only see it if you are signed in).
Before letting you download the paper, it asks for your contact information and whether you “have a budgeted project.” In other words, the price of the white paper is that you basically agree to be contacted by the company. This is standard practice on company-run sites and sites like IDG and Bnet where they distribute their own white papers, but it seems like they will have better luck finding takers on LinkedIn.
I contacted Hoffman to ask if this is a new feature. He responded via e-mail:
Yes, it’s a new feature in our advertising program. Essentially: Linkedin is where professionals search for people and information to accomplish business tasks. As such, whitepapers are valuable information for professionals in particular jobs and doing specific tasks. So, Linkedin has deployed an initial system for matching whitepapers to professionals that we will be further developing over the next couple of quarters.
If someone downloads a white paper on VMware and Intel, is that worth more than someone clicking on an ad? It certainly is a bigger commitment. LinkedIn expects to get $40 to $100 per lead. Soon LinkedIn will put up a white paper directory, and LinkedIn users will be able to spread them viraly by sharing them with their network.
Notice that he had to reinforce what he thought Linkedin is about. I happen to think that Linkedin is a terrific job recruitment/resume site and nothing more. Yeah, they will keep trying things but I am doubtful that much beyond recruiting will gain any traction. Reid, stick to job recruitment. Your site is that best for this. Stop trying to be something you are not!
Yeah, you’re right. It’s stupid for a business to try to “be something it’s not” and offer new services. Apple shouldn’t have saved itself from bankruptcy by making the iPod, Nintendo should have kept making playing cards (instead of stupid videogames, who even buys those?) and Amazon should have stayed a bookstore.
Umm, yeah right, Linkedin is a great platform to sell business products, software, etc. It will basically become a business-specific portal and there is more money in this genre than the free-for-all facebook, which is apparently just selling virtual goods. If Linkedin ever partners with a stock site like Yahoo Finance, then watch out.
I agree that for recruiting it’s great, but both LinkedIn and its users are trying to get more out of it — and struggling.
As a business networking site it has always mystified me why it doesn’t do more to broker valuable NEW relationships, for example, introducing people with specific needs to other members who provide a suitable service. This would be so useful and massively increase the return people get from the site.
Instead, LinkedIn still discourages you from trying to connect to people you don’t already know and presents only spam ridden groups as a half measure to get you networking with like-minded individuals.
The white papers initiative will suit larger corporations who can afford to spend all day churning this kind of stuff out, but how many businesses, especially small ones, can’t and don’t?
LinkedIn seems geared towards the needs of executives in the the largest companies who are already well networked. It offers little to help build a useful networks for those new in business or running their own small companies and hoping social media will introduce them to new customers.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
I agree that for recruiting it’s great, but both LinkedIn and its users are trying to get more out of it — and struggling.
As a business networking site it has always mystified me why it doesn’t do more to broker valuable NEW relationships, for example, introducing people with specific needs to other members who provide a suitable service. This would be so useful and massively increase the return people get from the site.
Instead, LinkedIn still discourages you from trying to connect to people you don’t already know and presents only spam ridden groups as a half measure to get you networking with like-minded individuals.
The white papers initiative will suit larger corporations who can afford to spend all day churning this kind of stuff out, but how many businesses, especially small ones, can’t and don’t?
LinkedIn seems geared towards the needs of executives in the the largest companies who are already well networked. It offers little to help build a useful networks for those new in business or running their own small companies and hoping social media will introduce them to new customers.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
Interesting..but could this be a major source of revenue for Linkedin? I really doubt that.
Good part is that these whitepapers can be targeted to groups et al – so very targeted audience.
I think it can, its extremely well targeted. best of luck.
excellent idea! i think i will use it a lot.
Curious that they are still asking for address information – it would seem that the information LinkedIn already has – authenticated company, industry, and title information – would be much more valuable to advertisers/enterprise companies.
If LinkedIn could lower the obstacles further to downloading whitepapers (make it a 2-3 click process instead of requiring multiple form fields to be filled out), that would be more of a game-changer.
LinkedIn, like most large sites like that, may have a privacy policy that prevents them from automatically sharing your personal information with (in this example) VMWare. That’s probably why they ask for it again.
st: That’s why I said a “2-3 click process” (i.e. one click for “authorize LinkedIn to share my information with this vendor”), as opposed to automatic.
Hi Erick,
I guess it could work only if its done the right way and there’s no spam involved.
Mani Raj
Havoc Marketing
LinkedIn and Spam are like twin brothers. You can’t expect much from LinkedIn with regards to spam.
Does anyone notice that LinkedIn is slowly becoming like Friendster, MySpace and Hi5. Like an old guy waiting for his time.
They really need to rethink the amount of info requested to download white papers.
May turn some folks off– especially those who prefer to stay anonymous.
“May turn some folks off– especially those who prefer to stay anonymous.”
Nice. So there are people out there using networking sites to stay anonymous.
So how long does linkedin have before they become the next yellow pages?
I just stopped following Reid Hoffman on twitter.
Cool, two things I have no interest in, together at last!
Intriguing.
Is there a list of papers a person has previously downloaded?
If I wanted to indicate interest in being contacted by the author company, that would occur *after* I have read the paper, so embed a url back to linkedin at the end.
A list (on my profile?) would give opportuntiy for feedback as well as a place to actively submit yourself as a sales lead.
Sam Beauregarde: Don’t talk to me about contracts, Wonka, I use them myself. They’re strictly for suckers.
Don’t talk to me about white papers, Wonka, I use them myself. They’re strictly for suckers.
YES! There are lies, damned lies and White Papers!
I just pity the poor slobs who get “contacted” over and over and over and over, because I gave out their contact info.
I’d much rather have the ability to re-direct people to Oshyn’s website to download whitepapers on our own website. Although it could be a great service. I like how CNET sites like Techrepublic posts an intro and a when you click to view it redirects to the oshyn.com sign in page to download our whitepapers.
Sometimes I think these features only really appeal to Hi-Tech CXO’s – I think maybe somebody else needs to drive development of apps in LinkedIn….
Lewis: agreed on the point about keeping a list of downloaded white papers. perhaps better than that would be a one/two-click white paper recommendation process since you wouldn’t want every white paper you download showing up if they turn out to be useless. It’d be good to be able to add public or private comments too.
Rich Swier: I’m 22, definitely not a CXO. I like reading white papers. Maybe it’s you old people who don’t?
LinkedIn, are you listening, brand monitoring, taking the feedback among the comments and placing them into a relational database, with the ability to help you understand what people want?
Cloud Computing, now there an idea for LinkedIn, give the ability for LI to put their data in a cloud, like Salesforce has done with their Cloud products…awesome stuff and relevant.
LinkedIn – please listen to what we want, verses what you think we need.
Shh, don’t give them any ideas. Perhaps there is another network on the way that will blow away anything LinkedIn has to offer and you can be assured they’ve already thought of that.
Nice innovation this and as someone rightly said, can become a good revenue stream for LinkedIn later on.
By the way, if you are looking to make the most of your LinkedIn account, check out networking expert Jan Vermeiren’s new book “How to REALLY use LinkedIn”. You can find a free lite version at http://www.how-...e-linkedin.com/
This is neat, cool, investive, superfragilistic .