Sean over at Got LinkedIn has taken to Bitstrips (see my Bitstrips review at The Virtual Handshake) like a fiend. Here are his latest installments:
Sean has a new e-book coming out — watch for it on his blog.
If you’ve actually visited the site and aren’t just reading this in your RSS reader, you’ve probably noticed some pretty drastic changes, and maybe even a few bugs the past couple of days. The broken links should now be fixed, and the navigation is all working again. Not sure when I’ll have all the images back up, but soon.
As you may have surmised, Linked Intelligence is no longer a part of the b5media network. It was by mutual agreement, all on good terms. In the simplest terms, 6 posts a week doesn’t work for me, and less than 6 posts a week doesn’t work for them. I had a great experience at b5 — love the staff and my fellow b5 bloggers who I got to know.
But there’s more to the story…
Actually, I’m going to be phasing out Linked Intelligence. I have a few more posts I want to write here, and I do plan to leave the site up indefinitely. There’s a lot of good content I’ve created here over the past couple of years, hundreds of inbound links and thousands of monthly visitors. I don’t want to just toss that away and leave a bunch of dead links around the web.
So why am I phasing out Linked Intelligence?
It’s a combination of things:
1. I’m incredibly busy with other things. This is first and foremost. Between promoting our new book The Emergence of The Relationship Economy, the many projects and prospective clients we’re working on at Link to Your World, my ongoing work as Entrepreneurs Guide at About.com, and so on, I need to reduce the number of things on my plate, and this blog is lower priority.
2. LinkedIn is doing some things very well now that they weren’t doing when this blog started. LinkedIn didn’t even have their own blog until a year ago. It got off to kind of a slow start, but now they routinely announce and explain new features, offer tips & tricks, highlight LinkedIn media coverage and (my favorite new edition) share user success stories. I created this blog to fill a need, and LinkedIn is finally filling much of it themselves.
3. LinkedIn is doing some things far worse now than they were two years ago. LinkedIn has become simply impossible to deal with as someone trying to evangelize their platform. I could give my own personal dirty laundry list a mile long, but I won’t — what they do to other people is more than enough. When I see how LinkedIn continues to ignore and/or mistreat some of its strongest evangelists and power users and refuses to address issues that have been going on for years, I simply no longer want to have my personal brand tied to their brand (that’s OK - they probably feel the same way, strangely enough).
I think LinkedIn is a great tool, and I will continue to use it, advocate it to my business associates, and train clients on using it effectively, but I’m just not going to waste any more of my time promoting it when they are not just unsupportive, but downright hostile to those of us who try to do so.
I’ll be writing some more about this in the near future — not because I hate LinkedIn, but because I love it. I think their current policies are going to drive it into the ground, and I hope that some of the investors and executives are listening, because right now, the real conversation that’s going on among LinkedIn users doesn’t seem to be having much impact on the decision-makers.
Image by tamaphi via Flickr
LinkedIn launched their blog in April 2007, shortly after hiring Mario Sundar as Community Evangelist. I know there are probably almost as many different opinions about what LinkedIn ought to be doing with regard to community outreach as there are LinkedIn users. So I thought I’d see what Mario has to say about the topic on his own blog, Marketing Nirvana, where he writes about community evangelism. In searching his blog, I came across this post:
5th P of Marketing - First 4 Steps in Social Media Engagement
In it, he describes “the fifth P of marketing” – Participation. He says that companies that want to engage in social media need to do 8 things:
- Be where the users are
- Facilitate easier means of communication with them
- Create brand evangelists
- Be a source of information on the company
- Respond swiftly and honestly
- Start publishing content
- Stir internal company conversations
- Improve product and user experience
So, one year later – how do you think LinkedIn is doing in each of those areas?
I’ve set up a simple survey – just rate LinkedIn on a scale of 1 to 5 in each of those areas.
Feel free to discuss the topic further here in the comments, but please not at the exclusion of responding to the survey, which should take less than a minute. Also, please feel free to repost this anywhere you want – there’s no limit on the number of survey responses, and the more we have, the more meaningful and impactful the data will be.
Image: Marco Michelini via stock.xchng
