5 things that will sink LinkedIn’s empire

By Janus Boye

Will LinkedIn last? A reasonable question given the remarkable and monopoly-like position LinkedIn has achieved as a professional network during the past decade.

The announcement that LinkedIn is being acquired by Microsoft came on June 13 and has so far had little impact for the many using LinkedIn to showcase their work. According to their own numbers, LinkedIn has over 400 million users and more than 100 million active users per month.

Clearly LinkedIn will not disappear anytime soon, but people such as Silicon Valley pioneer Andreas Ramos say LinkedIn is about to lose its place at the centre of the social Web for business purposes.

I had a recent conversation with him trying to understand better why he considers LinkedIn a dinosaur. Or as he says in standard Valley jargon:

“There is a great opportunity to build a better LinkedIn”

1. The customers are recruiters, not users

LinkedIn started as a social networking site where people posted their professional profiles so they could connect to each other. But people weren’t willing to pay to build social networks. However, recruiters are willing to pay thousands of dollars per month for access to the resume database. So LinkedIn turned into a service for recruiters to find workers.

This means LinkedIn’s customers are recruiters, not users, so LinkedIn pays attention to the recruiters. And ignores the users.

That’s why many of LinkedIn’s user tools, such as profiles, messaging, portfolio, and so on are nearly useless or look like something from fifteen years ago. It’s very easy to spam users, so many requests for contacts are ignored. There is a way to post articles, but it’s convoluted and few use it. There is no way to send an email newsletter to one’s connections. The messaging tool is outdated. The app is nearly useless. Although LinkedIn did an IPO and raised $350 million, they spent very little of it on improving the user experience or interface, because users don’t produce revenue. In contrast, recruiters, who pay around US $1,000 per month per seat, have powerful tools to filter and sort resumes.

So LinkedIn is a resume database. Which means if you have a secure job, there’s little reason to visit LinkedIn. LinkedIn is not a Facebook for professionals, but a site for recruiters.

2. LinkedIn isn’t the place to find the best jobs

When sociologists studied social networks, they learned that a few people have weak or poor connections and most people have okay connections. However, a few have thousand of connections and those connections are to the best people. Those top connections are also the people in charge of companies, projects, and budgets. They are the ones who hire.

Which means top people don’t need LinkedIn. They already have extensive personal networks. And the ones who hire also don’t use LinkedIn to hire; they ask their friends quietly for recommendations. The top people share their resources.

The bias towards recruiters affects how people are using Linkedin. Users see it as a resume site, not a professional networking site. Since the goal is to get a job, it’s easy to buy fake recommendations or create bloated or too-good-to-be-true profiles.

The solution lies outside of LinkedIn, and is quite simple, which I will expand on shortly.

3. LinkedIn are ignorant of the member experience

For a company with almost 10,000 employees, you would assume there would be a sizable team focusing fully on delivering an outstanding customer experience to members.

If such a team actually exits, their progress is weak to say the least. As already mentioned, there are simply so many examples of the member experience failing. To name a few:

• The mobile app still leaves great room for improvement

• Groups and community management is far behind anything you would expect in 2016

• Emails when someone updated their profile. Sure, you will receive emails to make you pay for what used to be free. But useful email notifications, such as a new posting in your group or an important job change: forget about it.

• Do you enjoy your activity stream solely containing postings about Pokemon Go? Or Chuck Norris jokes. No? Well, who cares? Linkedin definitely doesn’t.

• Did you like a recent update a friend wrote and want to link to it? Facebook has had the feature for years, but for Linkedin such a feature is rocket science.

4. LinkedIn doesn’t care about your career

You would think that a site built around finding jobs would have helpful career advice, but there is very little career advice or help at LinkedIn. What they offer is generally useless or bad advice, such as telling you how to appear like someone the recruiters want, instead of actually becoming better at your job, how to expand your career, or other fields and opportunities.

LinkedIn could hire the very best career coaches to offer free books and videos on how to create and manage your career to your benefit. It could be argued that LinkedIn and recruiters don’t want you to improve your career because when you move up, you move out of LinkedIn’s and the recruiters’ range. But LinkedIn is already making enough money so they don’t care about this.

If you’re looking for a job or want to improve your career, my advice is to put LinkedIn lower on your list of tasks. Reach out to people who are at the top or ten years ahead of your career. Send them an email, call them, or even better, meet them for lunch or coffee. Join professional organizations and volunteer to help in the organization. Build your network. Take classes, read books, and improve your skills. It’s the oldest advice in networking handbooks and with good reason: that’s how the world works. The few at the top have all the connections: get to know them.

5. LinkedIn provides recruiters with well-educated white people

If the people at the top aren’t on LinkedIn, what about everyone else? The people who use LinkedIn are mostly white-collar mid-level corporate staff. They are generally in companies that use computer technology. Workers at small companies in traditional fields rarely show up.

This means people at the bottom aren’t on LinkedIn. They work in jobs that don’t use computers. These jobs are low-pay so the recruiters have little interest because the recruiter fees are small. McDonald’s isn’t going to hire expensive recruiters to fill temporary jobs, nor will they use LinkedIn’s recruiter tools for this.

To quote Andreas:

“I’d hate to see how low the numbers are for black women. LinkedIn has what recruiters want, or to put it the other way, it doesn’t have what recruiters don’t want. This means LinkedIn has a significant share of the blame for low diversity in the workplace.”

Thoughts on a better professional network

There’s a strong need to build a jobs and careers network platform that reflects the world we live in.

People would be able to improve their skills and move up in their career. By building strong relationships, they would have better job security, either by being in better jobs or able to find new jobs when a company shuts down.

A new platform could also make money from recruiters, but a new platform will hopefully focus on a superior member experience.

More about the problems at LinkedIn

Thanks to Niels Rysz from the communications department at higher education institution UC SYD in Denmark who shared several good examples of horrible customer service at LinkedIn in his posting in Danish: LinkedIn kolos på lerfødder.

Patrick Moore wrote a good analysis titled LinkedIn has lost its vision. Why don’t people update their LinkedIn profile? Patrick offers the following reasons:

• “I am not looking for a new job”

• “I am looking for a new job, but I don’t want my manager to know I am looking.”

• “I just got a new job, and I don’t know if it is going to work out so I am not putting it my profile until I know that it will.”

Make content business-critical — not just icing on the cake

By Janus Boye

When a financial crisis hits, marketing gets fired. Or downsized. Management starts getting ideas; perhaps someone from IT or finance could write some sort of blog? The general notion which especially reveals itself in a time of economic instability, is that content is nice to have, but not essential. It’s icing on the cake.

Rahel Anne Bailie is an expert on content strategy, and she knows how content can be a business assist — an investment in the company’s future. In this posting, I share some of my lessons learned from a recent conversation with her.

Planning your content

You wouldn’t try to run a business or organization without a business plan. Sometimes it seems the same is not true for content. It seems that often the immediate goal of your shiny new content is mistakenly taken for the long term goal. While an immediate objective may be to inform or entertain, you should always be aware of how accomplishing this will support your long term business goals.

Too often emphasis is placed on simply creating some sort of content. And getting it out there. On some sort of channel. But you need the right sort of content on the right channel. This means that strategy should always be the defining term when it comes to content. Therefore a process where the organization’s high-value activities are identified, is needed. When this is done, content can be geared towards supporting those activities.

This process is not just important before creating new content. It should also be applied to existing content. Maybe you already have piles of great content, but perhaps you are not using it in a fashion that lines up with your overall goals?

A content ecosystem

When your content is very directly supporting your organization’s long term business goals, it will result in an ecosystem in which it will undoubtedly be easier to gather support for the process of creating and distributing content.

If important stakeholders can see how investing in a piece of content can improves sales or reduce the number of confused customers calling customer support, then content suddenly becomes a method for achieving long term success — instead of icing on the cake.

This process also involves a great deal of strategy; identifying different types of content and what business goals they serve. This process might reveal rudimentary content that no one had really thought of as content — perhaps it is perceived as information or design — and therefore overlooked in the content strategy.

With a content strategy in place, you might realize that content is all around us, and that not aiming those resources at our business goals is downright wasteful.

Learn more about content strategy and digital communication

Rahel is a frequent and popular Boye speaker and you can meet her in November in Aarhus at the Boye Aarhus 23 conference.

You can also join our peer groups, where everything content is a regular topic, e.g. in the CMS Expert group and in the digital communication groups.

Finally, you can also read more in these related postings:

• How to create evergreen content

• If BBC can do it, so can you: Focus on audiences

Digital is part of the customer experience — also at museums

I have been to see the Mona Lisa, but it was before the advent of smartphones. Today, I imagine there are crowds trying to take a selfie with her. Some might think that this is sacrilegious, and that you should let the several hundred year old painting speak for itself. At the same time others are beginning to appreciate the blessings of digital in regard to traditionally sacred areas like museums.

Suse Cairns is director of audience experience at Baltimore Museum of Art and she has a thorough understanding of how to apply digital to the world of art in order to achieve a meaningful and enriched user experience.

Digital has changed how we experience the world

Our lives are digital. There are many examples to this, and the museum experience is one of them. The way museums collect data and present it has changed. In almost every aspect of our lives we rely on the Web to provide us with the most precise and relevant information. So why should this be any different when experiencing a 200 year old painting? Respect of its age?

Should we do the same in regard to elderly people, and not expose them to a smartphone?

Suse Cairns points right to the matter at hand with this quote:

“The world continues to move past the simple physical/digital dialectic towards a more nuanced matrix of architectures uniting digital and material culture.”

The fact that digital have become mobile means not just that constant distractions are in our pockets — it also means that knowledge is only a push away. Having knowledge about something allows you to experience it in depth, and this understanding is already flowing through a lot of museums, where digital becomes a vibrant part of giving an audience the best experience.

The evil data collection — that is simply making our lives easier

That is one side of it; how users themselves are already using digital to gain the best experience. Another is the fact that museums are increasingly using digital data collection to improve upon the user experience. In a recent posting on transforming audiences, transforming museums, Suse focuses on innovative museum projects in recent years:

“It makes sense, then, that some of the most innovative museum projects we’ve seen in recent years combine audience experiences with data-collection and analysis.”

A critique that is often raised, is that data collection is somehow solely about evil marketers performing inception like maneuvers with our minds. But the ever increasing focus on user experience, which Suse describes above, is rapidly changing this; resulting in a world where our offline actions might very well be transmitted into a digital sphere, but where they are also given back to us in the form of real world experiences suited to how people really behave; resulting in easier lives.

From project manager to product manager

The line of communication between the inhouse project manager and the agency is a troublesome one as I outlined in the post on the agile project manager.

When things go wrong, the agency gets blamed no matter what. But what if it’s not the agency, but the dynamic of having multiple project managers that causes problems? Perhaps the time has come to rethink the project manager role on the customer side of the table?

Søren Ahlers-Jensen is a product manager in the IT department at the Region of Southern Denmark and will be speaking at the J.Boye Aarhus conference in November on the tricky discipline of product management. Below he shares his thoughts on project managers and how their function might be better handled by a product manager with great results to follow.

What's the problem with project managers?

The core of the issue is when the daily organization at the client is incapable of taking over and implementing the results of the project. Too many projects, without the proper resources and infrastructure to support it, can leave one without most of the benefits you were hoping when you started the project.

Think about it this way: The product is more important than the project

Even when a project is finished in a satisfactory way, you will not harvest all the benefits if you don’t have someone who can implement it into to the daily workings.

What a great project - can someone please take it off my hands?

I've seen this scenario countless times: An in-house project manager finishes a project and everyone suddenly leaves the building. The project is finished and it all went well, so the project manager can rest, but not in peace. For what happens with the project now?

It takes someone to govern the outcome of the project, and that transition can be more difficult than being a project manager for the initial implementation.

A product manager must take a longer view because their doublesided function will force them to think the project as an integrated part of the business's overall strategy. Also, in this way the winding road between project manager and the rest of the business is eliminated.

Product managers – when to have an octopus

So when should you have a product manager? A product manager is more of a function than anything else. This means that a good product manager needs to be able to grasp different areas of the company; he or she needs to be able to talk strategy with the director, but also handle the more technical stuff on an intranet.

Strong communication skills is important, but the essence is that he or she needs to be the one that knows the product and the bigger impact in depth.

“Thanks for summarising this, it is a challenge we face every day when working on projects for clients. The questions is how to raise the bar and make us more like product managers when we have strict budgets and deadline :)”

— Ivo Lukac

Everyone owns digital

By Janus Boye

Who owns digital? This has been a much debated topic over the past two decades.

According to Jonathan Sullivan, a Boye group member and chief digital officer at American The Health Management Academy, this question has a very simple answer:

“Everyone owns digital”

In this blog post, Jonathan argues why everyone owns and should own digital and why digital leaders should move beyond the question of digital ownership.

Digital ownership question is no longer useful

There has been a lot of debate over the past twenty years about where ownership of digital—web, e-commerce, blogs, user generated content, social media, email marketing, mobile, wearables, the Internet of Things—ought to reside within an organization.

I have often found myself in the middle of this debate (and sometimes instigated it) over the years. The result, as our very own Stephen Emmott recently noted, is that

for many organizations, digital is accommodated rather than assimilated into the structure and operation of the whole.

Recently, I have concluded that the question of “who owns digital” is no longer useful to helping organizations cope with the disruption of digital transformation and that it is time for digital leaders to move beyond this struggle.

Why everyone owns digital

Digital is now integral to every aspect of business (whether an organization has acknowledged it or not). Digital is no longer a separate business function, but is simply the way that business is done, all across the enterprise, all the time. Therefore, digital is now the responsibility of everyone in the organization (whether they have acknowledged it or not). Everyone in the organization owns digital.

Everyone owns digital not only in the context of their specific area of responsibility, but also as it pertains to the success of the organization as a whole. I think most digital professionals could agree with the former, but why the latter?

Digital by its nature involves customer experiences and data that cross business lines. Each individual digital experience created within an organization—even something as granular as the copy within a particular content item—is inherently part of the business’s overall digital customer experience. Each one also generates data, which has value beyond the context of that individual digital experience.

What digital means to non-digital roles

Let us look at an example of what it means for someone in a non-digital role—a subject matter expert who creates content—to “own digital.” Beginning at the most fundamental level, a content creator should be aware that their content will be used digitally, either in whole or in part—possibly in ways that are not yet known to them.

This has ramifications for how the piece will be composed. It also has ramifications beyond the traditional endpoint of accountability for content creators; the point at which they click “publish” in the CMS, or—gulp—hit the “Print to PDF” button in Microsoft Office. There are questions the content creators should ask themselves. What opportunities might exist for presenting this content digitally? Is there something about the audience, the context, or the content itself that suggests a potential digital usage or presentation? What has been learned from previous customer interactions with similar content that could improve execution on the current piece?

Stretching the boundaries of accountability even further, the content creator should think about how their content relates to other activities of the business. Has there been content created elsewhere which is complementary to this content, or to which this content can be linked to expand the overall content ecosystem? This example demonstrates how digital considerations are relevant to the traditional responsibilities of those in non-digital roles, and how digital pushes them to act beyond the boundaries of their traditional job descriptions.

Your role as a digital leader

What does it mean for digital leaders, if everyone in the organization owns digital? Aren’t we the digital experts? What is our role, if everyone is supposed to “wear a digital hat?”

The role of digital leaders will continue to be much as it has always been—to be the subject matter experts on how all of the aspects of digital can be used to benefit the organization. This means supplying the vision, evangelizing new digital tools and practices, providing governance, and modeling new approaches to doing business with digital.

Where our role will differ is in the doing. If digital is no longer a separate business function, but is simply the way that business is done, all across the enterprise, all the time, then digital execution cannot be contained within, or even controlled by, one part of the business. Our role is to go out into the business and empower non-digital subject matter experts to enter into the digital mindset, through education, partnership, the development of workflows, and yes, even by holding them accountable.

It is time for digital leaders to move beyond the question of ownership over digital. The reality of today’s business environment is that digital is a widely distributed business function in which everyone in an organization shares responsibility. As digital leaders we should take the lead in embracing this reality and advance an “everyone owns digital” mindset within our organizations.

Demonstrating Yammer’s business value

By Janus Boye

What can you do to create a flourishing and responsive Yammer service at your organization? How do you get your co-workers to embrace the platform and prove its business value to senior management?

Lesley Crook, IC Digital Lean Strategist and speaker at Boye Philadelphia 15 conference, tells the story of how GSK’s Yammer service demonstrated business value by adopting her ‘qualitative’ model in this posting. The below photo is from her popular conference presentation back in May. 

Read How GSK works with Yammer for additional details

Lean ways of working

GSK has a gold standard continuous improvement model called “Accelerated Delivery & Performance” (ADP), which is based on the Toyota Production System (TPS) model. It combines the best of Project Management, Organisational Development and Lean Sigma knowledge networking fundamentals. Coached in GSK businesses but not broadly encouraged in the internal communications area. Being curious I signed up for on-the-job Lean training with mentors and coaches. This opened my eyes to a different way of working and an output of mine was the creation of a unique Yammer “qualitative” business value model.

ESN’s have only previously been determined by using quantitative measurements such as the size of the network and the number of ‘posts’ within groups. Although these measurements are important they need to be put into context.

My model helped to do just that. Yammer group owners are asked a series of short questions that extract key information about their group in relation to areas such as business strategy, project management, organisational development and business transformation, plus cultural behaviours and values. The responses demonstrate how successful Yammer groups are providing real business benefits and helping employees to understand the relevance of Yammer to themselves and their work.

The model also introduces and raises the relevance of “business intelligent #hash tags” that enable searching and data mining strategic content. It helps to share knowledge networking stories cultural sentiments and captures meaningful, actionable tacit insights - not data. It enables working out loud in a network, creating a positive but somewhat disruptive flow - working up and out of silos. These stories can be shared back into the business.

#Yammer50k campaign

November 2014 the output of the model was our global communication campaign. This celebrated reaching the quantitative achievement of 50,000 registered users and demonstrated Yammers qualitative business value. Me and Matt Bartow took-over our intranet homepage and shared 10 Yammer success stories that spanned R&D, manufacturing, sales, marketing and corporate communications.

Each story contains a senior leader “golden“ quote describing how Yammer supported business objectives and company values. Also, how Yammer groups made their part of the business more “responsive” e.g., decreased email trails and increased collaboration by working across business, time zones and geographical boundaries enabled by powerful translate functionality when appropriate.

Leaning up your enterprise social network

Lesley’s model has been endorsed in the private and public sector, Yammer Microsoft management and a Cambridge University academic, but how would her model apply to your organisation? 

Feel free to leave Lesley or Matt a comment below