Greetings everyone and thank you for all the good test-suggestions I got from readers. You gave me a lot of web 2.0 portals to test, some of which were not even known to me.
Lets start of with the most popular web 2.0 business portals: LinkedIn
LinkedIn Review
You all probably have heard about LinkedIn. It started a few years ago with only 30.000 users and now has over 8.5 million. Probably half that number are unique business users.
Its’ portal lets you write your profile in a user-friendly way and helps you to find other profiles quite swiftly and accurately. Although you can use it to find people profiles which are related to a business or service, most people will use it to find jobs or (if you are a recruiter) candidates for jobs.
LinkedIn seems to only have ambitions in that specific area, so you cannot find services or products using the same technology which is a shame considering the amount of people who are now on this network. The system also doesn’t match business objectives (like CollectiveX does e.g.) .
In addition, LinkedIn also has the ideology that you ‘should introduce and help eachother for free’, so that’s also something we business users don’t want to hear.
The profiling is very much based upon the status of
your profile, not the profile itself. What do I mean by that? Well, if you have a big network and a lot of contacts which are connected to your LinkedIn network, you’ll end up higher in the ranking of searches.
You can choose for people with the biggest network or with the highest number of ‘recommendations’. Naturally heavy LinkedIn networkers are using every trick in the book in order to increase their number of contacts and to give eachother recommendations to end up high in the rankings. Quality is therefore very relative on LinkedIn, especially since you cannot communicate directly with one-another. It only has email options, no IM or Skype integration.
Summary
LinkedIn is one of the best and well known portals for job seekers. It thrives too much on ‘status’, it does too little in helping people in quality of online business and to create quality in personal communication.
It thus is still a long way away from real business and business objectives. It has a promising basis in the quantity of users, portal interface and user friendliness.
To LinkedIn: please understand the real business objectives of your users, let them make money out of introductions or introduce quality online quality recruitment services if you want to stay in that niche. Add the possibility of sharing photo’s and IM / Skype integration.
Points (1-10); Remarks
1) Manage and view profile: 7;
Good: simple user interface. Bad: only words, no photo / video integration
2) Manage contacts: 9; Good: very good batch up- and down-loading.
Suggestion: interface with Plaxo
3) Communication options: 3; Only email
4) Effective business use: 5; Limited to recruitment, take precautions
not to get spammed, not in line with real business (yet)
5) Growing potential: 8; Market-leader in its niche, could grow beyond
6) Money making potential: 7; Depends on the insight of their staff
Total: 39; Verdict: promising but a lot to do
If you want personal advise regarding your online strategy, just call me, I am a Bitwine advisor
