In my recent post, Getting to Know the Folks at LinkedIn, I made this statement:
What’s clear to me from my conversations with Steve and Mario, as well as past conversations with Patrick Crane and others, plus looking at the latest new features from LinkedIn, is that the main customers they are listening to right now are their corporate customers.
I can’t take back what I said, and I’m not going to edit/delete it — once it’s out there, it’s out there — but I am going to qualify it: LinkedIn did not say this to me — I’m reading between the lines in the context of their latest releases, and I may have gotten it wrong. According to Mario Sundar:
As I outlined to you during our chat, our priority remains the 20 million unique professionals (as of Mar 2008) who use LinkedIn.
The blog is one of the key ways we maintain that two-way conversation with these users and my favorite part is that some of these conversations result in new features (http://tinyurl.com/26c4bs).
And, it’s always good to hear users’ positive response to these as well (http://tinyurl.com/ynovgw).
As I said in the previous post, LinkedIn has a lot of input coming their way — I’m sure it’s a bit overwhelming at times.
My only caveat to this is that speculation like mine comes about because LinkedIn isn’t answering these questions themselves. They’re talking to some of their users via the blogs, their luncheons, etc., and to the media. I know it’s impossible to answer questions from 20 million users, but publicly responding to some of the tough questions would, I think, be very helpful to LinkedIn users and good PR for LinkedIn.
Image: Nara Vieira da Silva Osga via stock.xchng
[...] Editor’s note, 4/1/2008: In the section that follows, I’m leaving the text I wrote originally, because I believe in “owning your words”. But the following may make it look like LinkedIn employees said things that in fact they didn’t say. I was reading between the lines and speculating. I’ve since apologized. [...]