Marc: Welcome to LinkedIn Live WhosYourDaddy? I am your daddy. This is Marc Freedman the LinkedIn Anti-prophet, welcoming you to another edition of LinkedIn Live. And today is December 12, 2007. I am sure everybody is getting ready for the holidays. And we thank you for joining us.
And just a second here – let me see who we have on our line here.
Heidi: Hello?
Marc: Yes, this is the Priestess herself. Let me welcome Heidi Heyns the voice of milk and honey. Heidi how are you?
Heidi: Am doing great! Thanks for getting me into this wonderful chat room. I’m glad to be here Marc.
Marc: Well Heidi. Well thank you. We missed Heidi last show but we are thrilled to have her back. And Heidi, how is LinkedIn treating you?
Heidi: It’s crazy. It’s the holidays you know. Suddenly time is you know expected to be stretched out much longer than this because you’ve got so many things to fill your days and nights. Crazy.
Marc: Well that is terrific. Well good let me start with a little LinkedIn news here. Just a few formalities for our listeners as well as our chatters – we are going to be taking your calls at different points throughout today’s episode. So pay attention and do follow the directions.
If you want to call the show and you’re calling from the NowLive Player, there is a little button up there that says “Call the Show” near the top. If you clicked on that, the right side of the screen will then display a window called “Links”. And it says “Call the show” and there’s a number of numbers that you can pick from to choose. Hopefully there’s a local access number that is close to you.
I could tell you there isn’t any in Texas unfortunately. But you can use those to call into the show. When you call in, press 1 to go on the air and you will be muted. And what that means is you can hear the show. But you are not actually going to be participating until you’re fabulous host myself un-mutes you.
And we have the opportunity to let you join the show. So in any case, that’s how it works. And our guest today is going to be Mr Ask Dave Taylor – Super blogger, technical aficionado and LinkedIn commentator.
And we are going to have Dave up with us in a few minutes at the moment it’s time for our kind of “What’s New with LinkedIn?” I want to invite all of our guests and listeners, both live and who podcast and download later that you can – we’ve two discussion groups for you.
One is the WhosYourDaddyShow group which you can discuss what’s actually going on in the show and our guest and the things being discussed there. We have a general LinkedIn discussion group called Top LinkedIn. And I am actually going to use that for all of our LinkedIn news and notes.
And first if you weren’t aware, I was banned for two weeks – suspended from LinkedIn but I am happy to be back. Probably the top of the news for LinkedIn is that they have a new homepage design.
I know some people may not have seen it yet, but for a lot of people including myself it’s now part of your new homepage. It looks pretty slick! And they are trying to do some fancy Web2.0 things where you can add or delete some of the sections on the page.
Have you seen that Heidi?
Heidi: No. I haven’t. This is on LinkedIn?
Marc: Yeah. It’s on your homepage. You know my personal opinion on that is it does look cool, but it’s another step back. I mean look, I’m a networker you know we’re all here to do business. Why don’t they focus on things that help us do business easier – that (unintelligible) core networking that makes it easy to contact our contacts, to manage them.
Heidi: Uh huh.
Marc: Make it look pretty. Spending time on cool gadgets. You know (those that you do need).
Heidi: I have seen one thing that they seem to have added that maybe help communication and also prevent people from being suspended like you, I think. And that is the new “Send a Message” where you don’t actually have to get their email address. It puts it in – you know it masks the email in a sense when you send a message. Have you noticed that?
Marc: Well I’ve seen that. And you can’t use it to contact people that you are not connected to. I believe…
Heidi: I can.
Marc: No that’s only for people you are connected to. It’s their version of web mail. And I hate it! Have you tried it?
Heidi: No I haven’t used it yet.
Marc: I mean don’t we get enough messages today so that if someone uses that and I’ve seen people who’ve used it a number of times, it results in an email being sent to me. Of course you can change your settings to turn that off. But now it’s lumped in with all your messages on your LinkedIn Inbox as well as your Sent Messages.
So now there’s very messy juxtaposition of official LinkedIn introductions in InMail plus these LinkedIn messages and I just find it – it makes it more difficult for me to manage how I am using LinkedIn – because prior to this there is a clear demarcation.
You use LinkedIn to make initial contact with someone accepts contact, they get their email address you give them yours. And you can send email and continue to communicate with them. And now with – you’re right, and I thank you for bringing up LinkedIn messages, now they’re trying to kind of take over more of this so people can contact you and you can read and send messages directly from InMail.
But LinkedIn is not good at that. And it’s just kind of making a mess of things. And most importantly as a networker, one of the things I want to preach is being able to manage your introductions.
Because LinkedIn made this game of it. So now you if have a free account, you get five introductions. If you have a business account – fifteen. And that is a precious resource that you have to manage. And they have made this hard to manage!
And I have harped on this on a previous show and they have NOT done anything to improve it which is to help you manage your introductions, to help you filter and find exactly those introductions and open links and group messages that you’ve sent.
So that if they are stalling, you can withdraw it. You can resend it and manage your introductions. So I – anyway, this whole LinkedIn messages is just a way – you know again I think they are getting back from what they do well.
Fundamentally what LinkedIn is useful for is its huge database. And they do it great! I mean where else can you find 17 million business executives? But you know adding fancy Web2.0 stuff that just makes it look pretty, adding news feeds to your webpage, adding these messages you know makes it harder for people to actually manage their networking.
It’s not a very good community based service and I think they are making a big mistake by being that. So anyway that’s my rant on what’s pissing me off lately on LinkedIn.
Continue to Dave Taylor Part 2