My recent post on LinkedIn's strategy was the most popular post ever here at SF, with about 4,000 readers on the first day. This post surpassed the former record holder post "Microsoft Yahoo Makes Little Sense" which analyzed Microsoft's proposed acquisition. (The fact that both articles were strategic analysis does suggest I should do more posts on strategy.) Many readers wrote in to ask what I thought LinkedIn's strategy should be, which is the subject of today's post.
In thinking about a strategy for LinkedIn we should, of course, think about what is the user need and how the satisfaction of that need should motivate the user to re-visit the site (e.g. FaceBook), to enrich or add to their content on the site (e.g. Issuu) and to view the archiving of this content as yet another benefit (e.g. Flickr). Furthermore, we need to recognize that people have already committed to social media in terms of their daily time usage and almost nobody uses LinkedIn as an alternative to Twitter, FaceBook or email. Therefore, in considering strategic alternatives for LinkedIn we cannot tinker on the edges with blog posts or Tweets on a profile. We need to create real value for the user, who is a business person, in terms of their career, promoting their professional services or by providing quality content that is not easily available elsewhere (such as Hacker News for technology).
My thinking on a strategy for LinkedIn would include two new basic ideas:
- The "Ask a Question" feature on LinkedIn allows a member to post a question in one of over 20 topics in business, management and career, with most topics being more finely defined through sub-topics. The answers to most questions include 2-3 very insightful responses to the question and the answers are rated by readers to identify "best answers" and the number of best answers by a particular respondent in a category. By consistently providing good answers in a category one documents one's expertise. My idea for LinkedIn is that they should take this entire database of questions and answers and make it available on a separate website for everybody to benefit from. If you want to post a question or an answer you would still need to be a member of LinkedIn (another way to increase members), but much more important such a public database would allow members to promote themselves and their expertise across the whole web easily. This database might very well be the largest database on the web with good answers to business related questions. This feature might be a real benefit to members, would bring them back to the LinkedIn website more frequently to answer more questions and would help to satisfy the members need to promote themselves. For LinkedIn this second database might have tremendous revenue potential just in terms of ad revenue, given the size, quality and attractiveness of the database.
- The second feature I would add to LinkedIn is a Hacker News for business. Hacker News is a very simple site where people post the best posts on technology from a wide range of sources including blogs, corporate media (e.g. NYT) and white papers. The content is not moderated but the users create such rich content that I sometimes think that if I had only one RSS feed to read every day it would be Hacker News. A "Business News" on LinkedIn would bring readers to the website more often to post articles, would over time probably produce a better source of business information for the members than the automated sites such as Google News or Yahoo News and again could be a new revenue source for LinkedIn through ad revenue.
My two ideas have several points in common:
- It provides a reason for members to come to the site regularly and to promote themselves by answering questions
- It creates two new revenue sources
- It further promotes LinkedIn to new members through the database of answers
In the simplest terms, what LinkedIn needs to do is recognize the quality of the people on the site, leverage that asset and give something back to its members. Today the site gives very little back.
My post is not a completely new strategy but I think it would be a step in the right direction.
