All I Want for Christmas is to Love LinkedIn

LinkedIn, I don’t want to be negative, so take the following comments as constructive criticism to bring out the best in you. I believe in you, LinkedIn, and one day I’m sure you’ll show me you believe in yourself too. As the only large social media networking tool specifically built with B2B “linking” in mind, I am often disappointed at the lack of tools and cumbersome operating structure made available by your website.  While LinkedIn improvement wouldn’t be my favorite present of this holiday season, it could be a heck of a stocking stuffer because I want so much for you to realize your potential. Hopefully the following will prompt introspection leading to personal growth.

I will outline three beefs (in the interest of time), I have with LinkedIn, that keep me from sharing my love with the site under, the auspices that it will motivate the site’s developers.

Question & Answer

First, I have a serious issue with the Question & Answer area of the network. Although it is useful, expectation can sometimes promote disappointment. Question & Answer sharing between experts is an excellent idea to help people share information, but the search function can be difficult to navigate quickly and easily to inspire regular use.

Additionally, there are often instances when Questions are “Closed” and I can’t assist with some actionable and powerful insight I could offer. It makes me wonder how often this happens to me with questions I have asked. Closed questions wouldn’t be such a big deal if the query didn’t end up at the top of my search results; alas, closed questions still come into my stream of consciousness due to the unintuitive search ranking system.

Network Updates

My second beef is toward the Network Updates area on the home page. Similar to myself, it is obvious most people don’t keep the application open to post their blogs, whitepapers and articles on a regular basis. LinkedIn attempted to remedy this by allowing access to Twitter, a more real-time collaborative site, but it doesn’t work well for me. I can post from LinkedIn to Twitter without a problem, but I prefer to use Tweetdeck and the #In hash-tag – which is supposed to allow sharing between the two social networks – doesn’t always work for me. That is a fail of epic proportion, in my eyes.

Additionally, I don’t much care about some of the updates I do receive on my LinkedIn home page. Someone else’s recommendation for a person in my network and “who’s now connected to who” updates often don’t have much value for me. Hasn’t anyone at LinkedIn ever heard of the old axiom, “So What’s In It For Them (SWIIFT)”?

Sales & Marketing Support

Finally, I would like the site to be more useful for sales. While I enjoy the ability to search for companies; view their employees on the network and view with whom we’re mutually connected, prompting warm introductions, I am unimpressed that I can’t become a fan of a company and receive regular updates. Facebook, on the other hand, has Fan Pages allowing for constant contact with a business. The problem is Facebook skews more toward consumer marketing than it does B2B collaboration.

I operate in the B2B sector, and would like to get updates from companies and be able to mass communicate with organization’s employees that become a fan me, so that I can message them when I have a solution to an organizational need that can utilize my company’s skill set.  In short, I would like some tools allowing for more solutions oriented networking.

The possibilities with LinkedIn are endless, and it is this thought that inspires these criticisms. I didn’t have time to discuss the frustrations I have with the mobile application or the Groups section, but that gives me something to write about another day.

I would like to end on a high note, though. I am quite impressed with the “Jobs” section of the site. The search tool and ability to request a recommendation from your network makes this section robust and more opportunistic than HotJobs, Monster or CareerBuilder. Thank you for that, LinkedIn.

Are there issues you have with the site? Do you think I’m just complaining too much? I would love to hear what the body thinks about this issue.