It’s been pretty obvious from the stock price, but LinkedIn, which I’ve written about every so often, is really on a roll lately. The influencer content play (which I will admit I’ve been part of, in a small way) is a clear winner, the company is enjoying very positive press, and its premium services are getting really interesting as well.
Just today I got an email from the company titled “What’s new with people you know?” I found it compelling in a way that emails from nearly every other service I use – Twitter, Facebook, or Google – are not. CEO Jeff Weiner tells me that this email has been sent out every six months for the past three years, but it’s clearly been redesigned as more of a media product. I care about my network on LinkedIn, and the email was full of pictures of people who really matter to me, all of whom have gotten new jobs. It’s one of the most engaging messages I’ve ever gotten from a “social network.” (In case you want some history, I called LinkedIn out as a media company more than a year ago here.)
I also found the focus on numbers very interesting. 10% of my network – which is pretty big – have gotten new jobs in the past six months. That’s quite an intriguing lens on how things are changing in our industry. LinkedIn has always been a data-centric company, and each time I speak with Weiner, he’ll cite engaging statistics his team has culled from the network’s servers. This rolls up to Weiner’s big hairy audacious goal (BHAG) for the company – to map the global “economic graph.” As he puts it:
..we want to digitally map the global economy, identifying the connections between people, jobs, skills, companies, and professional knowledge — and spot in real-time the trends pointing to economic opportunities. It’s a big vision, but we believe we’re in a unique position to make it happen.
It seems Wall Street agrees. I’ll be watching LinkedIn more closely over the coming year, and I bet Google and Facebook will be too. Hoffman, Weiner and team have built something that both those companies, and many more, must find quite enviable.
My network on LInkedIN has been growing in the last month.. I let it have a crack at my Inbox (haven’t in years). The problem is it has found people I know..
But it does a REALLY BAD JOB or explaining or at least documenting HOW I know them (e.g., which email address did it find that linked me to person X?)
A Google+ Follow? Selling a Car on Craigslist 5 years ago? A Spamish email from a vendor(ish) person, Etc.
Yes a long way to go, but that’s kind of the cool thing, you sense all these are solvable issues that matter.
Yes.. very much solvable AND if solved will make the network more effective… for both the person asking for the connection and those recieving the request.
Totally agree with you, LinkedIn is enviable! It’s actually an exceptional bidirectional tool that has managed to reform how my company operates today. Linkedin is really about providing “informal access.” Access to people and organizations you normally would never have an opportunity to meet…
Arguably, the most valuable social network out there, but more importantly, it’s demonstrated its capability to scale and monetize. Transformative product in my opinion!