There is an IBM commercial that pokes fun of people who spend time on social networks in the workplace (see below). It shows a young, hip guy who brags about having “826 friends” and explains to an older boss-lady type that he “can find anyone.” So she says she needs a team of international finance experts who know merger arbitrage, speak Cantonese and can start on Monday. “I don’t have any friends like that,” admits the underling.
Well, if he was on LinkedIn, he might be able to impress his boss. The online business network earlier today quietly introduced a People Search beta. Once you opt in, a guided navigation panel appears on the right every time you search showing the breakdown of results across 11 different facets, including current company, relationship to you, location, industry, and whether or not they are looking for a job. By checking the appropriate boxes, you can narrow your search quickly and find who you are looking for.
A search for “mergers,” for example, brings up 108,345 results. But when I select people at least two connections away from me, who live in the Bay area, and are “potential employees” that narrows it down to 24 results. Since LinkedIn contains a lot of highly-structured data, it knows that “CEO” is a title and that “Cisco” is a company, so it can generate people results accordingly. Results in the guided navigation column are ranked and generated dynamically, according to how many results there are for any given field (a number in parentheses tells you how many results there are for each refinement). So it tells you where to look essentially
LinkedIn started improving search last Thanksgiving, and since then has seen searches double to more than 100 million queries a month. About a third of all visitors do a search, and it is increasingly becoming an important way to navigate the site. Better search means better engagement with the site, something LinkedIn could use. According to comScore, U.S. unique visitors declined from 8 million last March to 7.1 million in June. Maybe this will help.
Linkedin is so old, I don’t think anyone even cares, if Linkedin dies down slowly.
Linkedin, Myspace, Hi5, Friendster should get together and talk about how they failed innovating their sites.
Throw Plaxo in that group too.
Alot can be done to make these services useful. Maybe they are still very niche. Need more marketing and development.
Linkedin is not sooo old. How about FB? Linkedin is a great service geared to business networking. It’s a great tool.
So is Linkedin becoming a big phishing enterprise,
as it evolves a business model away from the interests of its users?
Btw, the guy in the ad. He doesn’t look like he has any friends.
Agree with Mike D. I do give LinkedIn credit for trying their hardest to increase engagement, but it’s all in vain. It’s a jobs site, plain and simple. Just copying Facebook’s features won’t make you Facebook.
Yeah, I mean, do you know anyone who updates their status on Linkedin?
Yup, recruiters
I update my status on LinkedIn, usually once or twice a week. Most of my updates bring me several responses from contacts who I might not hear from otherwise. This opens the door to good business conversations – real, live, in-person networking.
LinkedIn is a fabulous business research tool that helps me to find new contacts and learn more about those I already know. Measure the value of a network by what it enables people to accomplish, not the cleverness of its features.
LinkedIn has been one of the most valuable tools to me lately for recruiting, reference checks, and bizdev. It’s amazing you can get to most folks you need to in any company thru Linkedin and understand how you are connected.
Before a meeting, looking up someone’s background to find common ground, and a common network also helps.. networking 101..
All this work btw, is a by-product of DJ Patil Linkedin’s Chief Scientist.. total stud.. great work..
http://www.link...n.com/in/dpatil
> All this work btw, is a by-product of DJ Patil
> Linkedin’s Chief Scientist.. total stud.. great work..
> http://www.link...n.com/in/dpatil
Not to burst your bubble – but faceted search at LinkedIn is the brainchild of Igor Perisic (the Director of Search there: http://www.link.../in/igorperisic ), and John Wang (”the Duke” of Search: http://www.link...com/in/javasoze ), and required no new “science”.
Faceted search is a mostly “solved problem”, which is a difficult engineering exercise to scale properly, is nothing new.
I’ve been on LinkedIn almost from the beginning and have watch them grow and was pleased with the progress, but over the past year I’ve begun to wonder where it was going. I agree that it’s become more of a job site as Mike and John stated. I like the question and answers part as well as the groups but it is not enough to sustain interest. Your key point regarding “Better search means better engagement with the site, something LinkedIn could use” is right on target.
805-768-4521 http://bit.ly/oBsDJ
I have to disagree with Mike and John. For me, LinkedIn has been an incredible tool for several reasons:
1 – I can easily connect (and stay connected) with business contacts that I might tend to lose touch with otherwise.
2 – I can search for and find contacts (that I’m actually connected to by some degree) to do business with.
3 – I can not only search job postings (recently laid off!), but also do research on companies and the employees who work there.
I’m curious to know what kind of role those that *don’t* see the benefits of LinkedIn are in. I would imagine not sales or marketing…
You’ll find a large portion of the initial contrarian commenting contingent here to be of the mild troll variety. It’s subtle of course but there. These are users that post no credentials save a “Name” field entry. Hopefully, TC will eventually improve upon this with their commenting system in the future.
Linkedin Polls are very useful for finding a certain segment of folks and asking a hard question under time constraints. Is it free? Sure, but the pay version is what moves.
In vetting, you cannot trust Linkedin alone but it does go a long way to forming the basis of some amount of candidate research. It’s helpful for tracking and keeping up with the people that are outside of a pleasure lifestyle focused social network.
IBM ads by in large miss the point in how a social network value is determined. The drive by query by an exec is humorous but it is unlikely the kid would give a “duh” answer.
For example, in the case above, a cursory Linkedin search (absent the new feature mentioned in this article) would yield 135 candidates which a good intern could refine quickly if they were able to break apart the list — and probably yield 4-5 solid hits.
By contrast, a greater international representation for Cantonese might be found on XING
http://www.crun...om/company/xing
Is it me, or is LinkedIn a glorified resume service (i.e. Monster.com with a social networking twist)? I honestly can’t see the value. Maybe I’m missing something?
What’s scary for them is that they saw their traffic go DOWN nearly 15% at a time when unemployment is going up!
So in other words, if people can’t find value in LinkedIn’s ‘resume’ service during these times, what’s going to happen to LinkedIn when the economy turns around and less people need to rely on their resume?
Well, most of the value in most businesses is Human Resource cost, right?
So you would expect people to start trading the high value stuff first, and that is what is happening. I imagine folks will start doing accomodation/space next (LinkedIn is pretty good on zipcode search) and will work their way down to minor detail like outsourcing IT or financial services later.
Not sure why anyone would be scared about traffic going down when they are growing so strongly internationally. I imagine they are much more worried about whether they are going to manage to add on most of India without a massive service failure. Maintaining service levels from a cloud computing platform with a free entry price must be a nightmare.
Matt
I agree, it doesn’t have a lot that pulls me into the site on a regular basis but Linkedin is great for finding names of people at particular companies. I use it as a highly advanced address book.
I think LinkedIn never meant to be like facebook or compete with them. Now with the ever increasing popularity of facebook not only with teens but with mature crowd, is it that hard for them to invade LinkedIn’s turf. If fb come up with customizable profiles that one can configure depending on where they are using… they are already in and on top they are sitting on top of 250 mill subscriber base.
Job seekers want to post a resume and get offers. Employers want to easily drill down into those resumes, without paying ridiculous pricing. Let’s face it, Monster sucks… and Jobster is going no where.
There was a site profiled on here a few years ago that I used – GoJobby – Jobster acquired them and completely ruined their vision. It was awesome because people posted their skills, and you could easily drill down with a few mouse clicks.
LinkedIn is a great tool to keep the contact details of former colleagues or others that you only know vaguely. I recently deleted 4/5 of my Facebook friends as I found out that in fact I didn’t want someone I worked with 10 years ago to know everything about me. Every time I posted a status on Facebook I ended up thinking – do I really want my high school buddy (that I added to Facebook after meeting him at a boring re-union last year) to know my daily status?
However, I might want to contact my old colleagues, or my high school friend at some point if I need to. Maybe one of them has a skill and I would like to offer them a job. Maybe one of them knows someone I’m looking for. Therefore having them on a network such as Plaxo or LinkedIn is fantastic.
Today’s social networks are so occupied in connecting us all together, and connecting all the sites we are on together, and displaying our status announcements on all of them, that they forget that they can all exist as long as they have different purpose.
Plaxo = Great address book, as you can add your own names and addresses – while at the same time connect to people and have their information automatically update your address book
LinkedIn = Great for work related connections. One place to keep your CV and to have possibly some references and such.
Facebook = Great for your close friends and family
Twitter = Great for collecting 1000s of connections, and a wonderful source of intertubes materials….
What do you think?
Agree.
Nice observation.
I have a friend in the mergers & acquisitions field that utilizes LinkedIn to it’s full potential. Other than him I can’t think of one good contact I have made there. Basically obsolete at this point. I feel like they had their day to make a splash about 4 years ago and couldn’t quite pull it off. Oh well.
@clintstelfox
While I can’t argue with Facebook’s success, I’ve never understood the attraction. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is one of the few sites use regularly–as a persistent address book, people finder, and general tool for professional networking. Adding faceted search is a huge positive step for them.
The attraction to Facebook is simple.
People like sharing photos, videos, etc. and Facebook enables that.
Hope that helps.
Svavar… Have you tried Fast Pitch? It’s kind of a happy medium between Facebook (social) and LinkedIn (Career). It’s designed more for people trying to openly grow their network and market their business. I would liken it to a virtual expo that is open 24 x 7.
As far as Plaxo is concerned, what are they exactly? A social network? A contact manager? An address book. Someone help… I’m confused.
Like their current people search, very useful.
This LinkedIn/Facebook tribal rivalry is SO PC/Apple, 3G/IPhone.
Seems like technology device and platform choices are about as much fun for self-definition as choices of musical influences (see http://www.yout...h?v=3paf2TLrgsg).
Hi everybody,
for me LinkedIn has been a very useful tool for staying connected with people I know and finding out what changes in their career occur.
I like the fact that most of them really invest time to compose a detailed profile – it means the site is perceived as professional and opinion building.
The feature of searching for people, with its many functionalities, is one of the strongest points for the portal.
Also the discussions are for me absolutely priceless – especially those about different aspects of business. What I like about them is that they do really provide valuable information and not crap like on many other sites.
for me LinkedIn has been a very useful tool for staying connected with people I know and finding out what changes in their career occur.we all can be friends by our facebook.
we can earn maney money by thiswe can learn about maney thing by linkedin.
i can make maney friends i can shear my problum to them.
lol this is why i have linkedin profile for quite a while…nice commercial though
Its a great feature, and it serves the puropose of a professional social networking website of searching professionals as per the industry, organization etc.
Totally disagree with Mike D.
It’s a silly statement. LinkedIn serves a much more niche market then the other ’social platforms’ (all of whom were built on the core concept of LinkedIn). Different social platforms serve different markets for different purposes. LinkedIn is my primary source for business / contact related search.
Find people and company:
http://www.cnti.../companies.html
linkedin is good for recruiting — period.
Svavar Ragnarsson is right… different tools for different jobs.
And nobody seems to be asking , how much is the IBM lady charging her client to solve the problem?
She reminds me of a newspaper exec in 2000 dismissing Craigs list as not a threat to classifieds.
It’s not that IBM can’t do it better now, it’s just they charge 1000 x what it will cost to do that job in 10 years time,
LinkedIn has become my go to site for Social Networking. Anyone looking for employment or connecting with prospective clients should be searchable as soon as possible.
- Dean S.