That title pretty much describes my feeling about this conversation with Jenny DeVaughn of Social Precision in Atlanta. I met Jenny at Barcamp Nashville last month and realized she has expertise in LinkedIn…something I have been less than enthusiastic about in the past.

In this video Jenny provides excellent insight into how to think about LinkedIn.

The biggest takeaway for me is that LinkedIn is NOT a communication tool like Facebook or Twitter. It’s a research tool. If you make that distinction, it changes everything. Jenny shares some of the ways (some of which are almost scary) you can tap into LinkedIn for business research, business development, networking, and competitive intelligence.

If you’re trying to figure out where (or if) LinkedIn fits into your social media strategy, I think the 12 minutes in this video will be helpful. I know it’s got me rethinking LinkedIn.

What You May Have Missed In LinkedIn from Bill Seaver on Vimeo.

I have to say right off the bat that I’m not a big fan of LinkedIn. I’ve wondered for a while if I’ve been a bit unfair to LinkedIn and even have a video discussion coming soon (to be posted here on the blog shortly thereafter) with someone who’s going to share some ways about how to make the most of LinkedIn. But in all honesty, I never use it and have often wondered if it’s more trouble than its worth. If it didn’t have such a good SEO benefit for me I might kill it off altogether.

For the most part I don’t pay attention to LinkedIn, but there’s a particularly annoying feature that doesn’t seem to get discussed too much. The problem is that LinkedIn bills itself as a professional social networking tool that connects you to the professionals you want to know, but in my experience, it ends up allowing people you don’t know well asking you to connect them to people you don’t know at all. I’ve had this happen a couple times and just recently it happened again.

What’s It Look Like
Here’s how it plays out: someone who’s connected with you on LinkedIn sees that one of your connections knows someone they want to know. So, Person A is someone you know. They want to know Person C, who is not someone you know, but Person C knows Person B, who is someone else you know. So there you are being asked to connect A to C via B and you have to decide if you want to be the one to make that connection and if it’s worth the relational equity to spend with B to ask for furthering this connection to A. To me the whole thing seems like a good idea in theory but the reality of it isn’t so pretty. One several occasions now it’s turned out that I don’t know what Person A’s intentions are and I don’t really know person B very well either, not to mention I have know idea the relationship between B and C.

I feel stuck between being the bad guy to Person A because I’m not being very helpful and taking advantage of person B, because my only interest in them is someone they know. I think there’s a great opportunity for people to feel abused, spammed, or just down-right taken advantage of. I’d like to avoid all of these.

What You’re Really Asking For
My suggestion for people using LinkedIn is to remember that just because you can see who your friends are connected to, and who their friends are connected to, doesn’t mean that you need to start putting people on the spot. If you start pushing on those relationships for your own gain, the chances are you’re asking people to spend a lot of relational equity that they might not want to spend. Instead, do the hard work of figuring out how to get to know the person you hope to meet in a more authentic way. Twitter’s actually pretty darn good for that sort of thing and you don’t put a few other people on the spot in the process.

I think it’s time to make a call on something: LinkedIn isn’t necessary anymore. Why? You don’t need it. I don’t have anything against LinkedIn, I just don’t think it’s needed anymore, and I’m even wondering if it ever was. I wasn’t convinced of this until recently, but I have had so many conversations with professionals who say the same thing. To the person they all say, “I signed up for LinkedIn but never use it. It was just something I felt like I needed to do.” Personally, I fall into that category as well and I think I know why.

A Little Social Networking History
LinkedIn was created as a social network for business professionals. It emerged as MySpace was on the way down and Facebook was on the way up. Most professionals weren’t about to get into the spammy world of MySpace, and Facebook was just graduating from being a social network for students. LinkedIn filled the gap. It was poised to be the ultimate social network for professionals and it would have worked, except a funny thing happened. Actually two things happened: Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook quickly grew out of the student-only status and emerged as the definitive network to find or connect with just about everyone. Twitter provided another level of connection and conversation for the people who didn’t want their coworkers accessing pictures of their vacation or seeing status updates from the New Kids on the Block reunion tour.

Facebook emerged as the social network instead of just a social network and Twitter allows broad connections without as much self revelation if a person so chooses. Facebook and Twitter combined are the double punch in LinkedIn’s stomach and together they undermine everything LinkedIn could have hoped to become.

LinkedIn Gets Left Out
LinkedIn says it has three purposes:

1. To let you connect with past and present colleagues,
2. To find answers to your questions,
3. To “discover inside connections when you’re looking for a job or new business opportunity.”

As you look at the three purposes, you can see that Facebook pretty well has number one covered. There’s a reason Facebook is now twice the size of MySpace worldwide. The bottom line on connection is that if someone wants to be connected, they’re on Facebook.

Twitter is pretty good at connections, but it’s lesser known quality is information. Many people are just now waking up to the fact that Twitter is the first place where news breaks. Not convinced? Just ask U.S. Airways. Twitter breaks news, makes news, and with a few good friends, can get you speedy answers to your questions. It’s pretty amazing.

That leaves us with item number three: the “inside connections” benefit of LinkedIn. To some degree you can see this with Facebook and enough observation in Twitter. LinkedIn beats them both in the ability to display this information. What this doesn’t take into account, however, is the human factor. The idea of asking a friend of a friend for a favor (let alone a job) is a little uncomfortable for everyone. Sure, there are people who don’t mind it, but the average person is pretty protective of their relational equity, and you generally don’t want to spend it just because Mike from middle school saw you know someone who knows someone who he wants to meet. Just because you can see who your friends are connected to doesn’t mean they want to facilitate a forced interaction. They know their own reputation is on the line too. This was always LinkedIn’s biggest promise and weakest point. No amount of technology can overcome social etiquette and relational capital.

The bottom line is that LinkedIn isn’t necessary anymore. Everyone you’re going to want to connect with is on Facebook or Twitter (or both) and unless LinkedIn has something more to provide, I don’t know why you would need to use it.

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NOTE/IRONY: As I was about to post, I considered killing my LinkedIn profile altogether, but then I realized I probably shouldn’t. It turns out my LinkdedIn profile is the fourth entry on a Google search for my name. Since I’m not a fan of killing things off when Google’s indexed them I decided to leave it up. Guess LinkedIn has a little benefit after all.

Last week I conducted a social networking experiment. I had been asked to recommend someone in LinkedIn and as I was doing it I got to thinking about how I’ve never been big on writing recommendations for LinkedIn. In fact, I’ve struggled with LinkedIn’s true usefulness for most professional unless they’re in the market for a new job (and therefore need the networking components LinkedIn provides.) It’s great to make connections but I don’t get the sense of community and activity there like I do in Facebook or something more local for me like Digital Nashville. It’s not that I’m against LinkedIn, it’s just that it felt like something I should do but didn’t really see a direct benefit.

The Experiment

A funny thing happened while I was writing the requested recommendation. I started thinking about how bloggers strategically spread “link love” by linking to fellow bloggers to promote both blogs, so could two people benefit from some LinkedIn love in the form of recommendations? I think so…and my little experiment has proven so.

I spent about a half hour recommending people I know from various work experiences. Some are former coworkers. Some are current clients. Some are vendors I work with. I wrote short, genuine, personal recommendations for several people. And then I waited.

What happened in the 48 hours that followed was wonderful. I heard back from almost every single person. Some simply thanked me for the kind words. Others said they would return the favor and write a recommendation for me on LinkedIn. In one case, I found out the recommendation even made it to the “What Others Are Saying About Me” page on one guy’s business blog.

The bottom line was it bolstered my own LinkedIn recommendations a bit (with some others still coming I understand) and it earned me some relational equity from the rest of the people. It was a win for them (they received an unsolicited recommendation) and it was a win for me because I was able to do something nice for them and get a little LinkedIn recommendation love myself.

My Hesitation For This Post

One final thing…I should note that I was hesitant to post about this experiment because the last thing I want to do is misrepresent my motives in this experiment as self serving or that I only wrote recommendations for the favor that might be returned to me. That wasn’t the case because I actually didn’t know what kind of reaction I would receive. I suspected that some people would be happy with the recommendation, but I was equally braced for the fact that some people could be highly suspicious of an unwarranted recommendation so I only wrote recommendations for people I know personally and I didn’t ask anyone to recommend me back.

The way I see it is that the gift of unsolicited recommendations is the cake. If recommendations or relational favor are a result, that’s icing. The experiment was really just that: if I serve cake, does icing exist? I found that the answer is YES…as long my cake is authentic. Maybe you can serve some authentic cake today too.