Linked-Up Thinking

By Crush, Peter

The Wikinomics principle is coming to a website near you. Peter Crush speaks to Linkedln’s marketing director, Patrick Crane, about how global connectivity will be the activity of 2008 Forget Facebook; it is so 2007. The first – and some say the best – social networking website is Linkedln. It has been the place to affirm ties for career-minded business people ever since 2003, and while its younger upstart of a brother has hogged the populist limelight, Linkedln has silently been getting bigger. Last autumn, it hit the magical one million UK members mark- Facebook has3.5 million- and globally it is growing by another one million people every 22 days. In fact by the time you have read up to this sentence, 25 new employees will have added their details. At this rate, Linkedln will hit 35 million members by the end of 2008.

Ask each other for help

If you are still unconvinced about the HR significance of an increasingly wired-up wiki world, Linkedln aims to ram this concept home. Not only does it want members to passively link up by being on each other’s contact lists, it wants them to collaborate deeper by enabling them to ask each other for help. It will be possible through additions to the Linkedln site, an announcement made as Human Resources magazine talked exclusively to one of its directors, US-based Patrick Crane, the former VP of marketing at Yahoo!.

“The purpose of Linkedln was to maintain connection with people you respect,” says Crane. “With more than 15 million names on the system, we’ve reached a critical mass where phase two is possible If you’re in a profession, why not ask others what’s going on in it, or what you need to get this or that done, or if anyone knows someone who can solve a particular problem.”

It’s happening through an ‘Answers’ application, which has been tested since March. Members can type in a question and wait for replies – very similar to the wikinomics model. But it’s abold move. So far asking and answering questions has been restricted only to those within the first three degrees of separation – a friend of a friend of someone you actually know. It guarantees those answering questions feel comfortable about who is asking them, as they are already closely connected to someone they know, and so are trustworthy. The plan this year, however, is to extend the facility across the whole site. If it goes wrong, it will breach the important element of mutual acknowledgement that current Linkedln acceptances depend on.

“A network is all about people being predisposed to help one another,” says Crane. “On Facebook you can only see friends of friends. It’s limited, and not based on trust. We’re encouraging people to consider being’open’ as the raison d’etre for being on Linkedln.”

Open to new ideas

The demographic breakdown suggests that membership will be open to wikinomics-like activity. “The average age of Linkedln members is 34,” he says. “They have about 30 connected people each. We hope we will help create a free flow of ideas. We want to createanexpertsmarketplace,connecting buyers and sellers of information.” In theory, if everyone has the same safeguards as everyone else in allowing people in, the ‘purity’ of Linkedln should be maintained.

“Every time someone new joins, the probability of getting better answers increasesallthetime,”addsCrane.”HRDs should not only be able to surf our site to source new people, they should be establishing their own networks.”

The other change is that from now on, all questions and answers can be crawled by Google and Yahoo!, which means the people who asked and answered questions can easily be found, and HR directors can then make their own introductions to these people.

“Around 25% of our membership base do people searches every week. At first we expected members to say:’What can Linkedln do for me?’ We have been surprised to find just how happy they are helping other people. Linkedln isn’t a verb. It’s a state of being.”

We want to create an experts marketplace, connecting buyers and sellers of information

Patrick Crane, marketing director, Linkedln

Copyright Haymarket Business Publications Ltd. Jan 2008

(c) 2008 Human Resources. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.