LinkedIn Doesn't Get The Social Media World

LinkedIn has experienced HUGE growth -- particularly in the business/professional sector of the social media space.  But recent experiences with LinkedIn have led me to believe that they are accidental recipients of that growth, and don't really get (nor are they interested in) the social media world and space.  There are things that made LinkedIn a great place for business and professional networking -- distinct from Facebook, MySpace or the other social media sites, and now I'm certain that they have no idea what made them a great fit for the business world.

Last March (2008), I started a Group at Linked in, called the B2B Online Marketing group.  I had a designer develop a logo for it (because back then, you could only have a little logo that would display on a user's profile, and your group could link to an outside URL -- there was no other ability for group members to participate with one another).  Because we wanted to foster conversation with other B2B Marketers specifically about online marketing and what was working, etc., we started the microsite called B2B Online Marketing Pros (http://www.b2bonlinemarketingpros.com) - and associated that with the URL for the group.  Each month (or every other month) we would aggregate topics from around the Net, relevant to B2B Online Marketers and send a newsletter out to our group membership.

LinkedIn made the name and email address available to Group Owners -- and tells the users who are joining a group that this will happen.  LinkedIn also provided a CSV download of those members or those requesting membership to the group owner.  So it was really easy to export that list, and import it into the tools we used to communicate and measure responses, so we could gauge how well we were hitting the needs of the group with the content we were featuring and aggregating -- because we're interested in providing relevant content that helps B2B Online Marketers put together winning strategies.

The group is growing at about 240 members a month -- which is a pretty good clip, and new members get a nicely formed welcome message that includes the last email newsletter subject (and link to the site).

Then, 2 weeks ago, LinkedIn moved out "new" functionality for Group Owners -- called an Announcement feature, and at the same time removed the ability to export group member information.  Never mind that the group owners have grown their groups using LinkedIn, that many of them brought their offline groups to LinkedIn to make the management of the groups easier and provide a more "social" framework for interaction of the folks in their group.  So being able to send a monthly newsletter out, and export all of the current email addresses of your group membership, is something that many of LinkedIn groups were built around.  LinkedIn's response was "now that we've given you the announcement feature, you don't need to export members information." 

Point #1:  Their announcement feature provides ZERO ability to format the email, removes all the formatting so it gets delivered in a big text blob that isn't readable at all -- it's NOTHING I would ever send to my membership -- here's a clip of what it looks like:

Note: it is sent from a "noreply" email at LinkedIn, so no one could just hit reply and type a message that would be received by anyone, and there are zero statistics provided about open, clickthrough, etc.

Point #2:  LinkedIn has it's own group called the LinkedIn Products Forum that has a lot of group owners in it, and we have provided feedback to LinkedIn re: their products, features, and capabilities consistently.  When this "upgrade" was released, there were immediate discussions that were started, and to-date, there have been 117 comments in all -- making this subject THE MOST talked about, with some group owners imploring LinkedIn to put the export capability back in place. 

What has been LinkedIn's response?  NOTHING.  NADA.  They are absent.  I think they figure they have the market on the professional social media space, or that the venture money they received has VC's pushing that they need to be more like Facebook -- so they are blindly going forward trying to somehow "catch up" with what's offered by the Facebook crowd, with no understanding or willingness to engage with those who have helped build LinkedIn as the professional social space that it is.

I'm reminded of how Dell treated the social media space, and got nailed -- and now they have a very social strategy.  But I expect more from LinkedIn.  The social media realm is where they live, isn't it?  Or are they just a traditional, lucky company that doesn't really understand the success they've achieved? (unfortunately, I now believe it's the latter).

Here's the email I send out (and it has a way for folks to unsubscribe -- or reply to the email so we can read it), and it has a way for us to understand what happened with that email -- BASIC marketing tools to help grow interest and provide more relevant content (i.e. GROW THE GROUP AND IT'S VALUE TO THE GROUP MEMBERSHIP).

 

Further, we have extensive metrics so we can gauge how the content was received, and if it provided value to our group membership:

Suffice it to say, our latest email, that went out with our focus on Social Media Marketing, got a 33% open rate and a 48% click-through rate, which is very high based on standard email metrics.

So, besides being inept at providing functionality, LinkedIn makes unilateral decisions about it's functionality without regard to the "free" labor they get by way of people organizing their groups (which LinkedIn sells targeted advertising for their group pages).  And when we do raise up and sound the alarm, and at times even plead with LinkedIn to respond and join the conversation, and engage with us, they remain silent. 

The only thing I can think to do is take it to the blogosphere -- and see what we can accomplish here.

Please post your comments!

Kim

Comments

[Patrick Ross]

I’m contacting you on behalf of Marketbright. Wanted to know if you could provide a link to our blog from your blog as we have linked to yours.

www.blog.marketbright.com

Thanks,

Patrick Ross
Marketbright

[Rudrava Roy]

I recently started using LinkedIn and created a group for my local community. I'm a programmer myself, and like to automated repetitive/monotonous tasks. Not only does LinkedIn make some tasks difficult to perform for Groups, but it doesn't even let anyone else fill in the missing pieces! At least if they opened up their API, people can build cool mashups that LinkedIn would never think of otherwise.
I have to agree with you - LinkedIn doesn't get Social Media!