attention industry

My Stance on LinkedIn (Simpler.)

LinkedIn is an online resume tool with a thin social veneer. In terms of updates that you can expect to receive, they generally come in the flavour of ‘person X is now connected to person Y’, ‘person Z has recommended person Y’ and ‘You may know person Z’.

If you’re connected to someone, you can send a message to them, or read their profile. You can also pay to send a message to someone you aren’t connected to, which, in my personal opinion, probably irritates the hell out of highly influential individuals on LinkedIn.

Beyond irritating people you could not get in touch with otherwise, I’m not sure what LinkedIn adds to the business-focused networking space. I don’t consider it actively social, although I’ve seen there are many people who disagree with me. There’s nothing inherently wrong with LinkedIn, except that I think it has used it’s social veneer as a means of attracting attention from people who see the buzz value in social, but don’t want to actually undergo the shift in social norms that happens in social media. My issue with this is that I think this attention is a large part of LinkedIn’s assumed value.

Within 5 years, I think a veneer of social, without the attendant shift of social norms and interaction, will stop being interesting enough to inflate the value of something.

If this is the case, LinkedIn now replicates having a resume online, and organizes your business-only contacts in a way that does not encourage personal or social communication. This might be useful for ‘pure’ networking, ie, intentionally seeking out people of use to you. I, personally, don’t think that ‘pure’ networking is a good way to build valuable professional connections. I feel the same way about a paid invite to email someone.

So in LinkedIn, I see a purported social network that isn’t optimized for social connection, that replicates resume function, and that doesn’t add anything new to the traditional, or dominant, hiring process.

This was the main point I had regarding my (pure guesswork) 5 year limitation on LinkedIn being relevant; that there is about a 5 year window where same old thing masked as innovative can still inflate value by leveraging a trend. And I think, in terms of it’s value as a technology and not as a culture, social is often applied as a trend.

Do I have an issue with the traditional hiring process? Yes, and many people do. This probably led to me rambling more than I should have in my previous post.

Hopefully this response was more well thought out.