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For the past five years I have chosen to invest my professional online social networking efforts in using LinkedIn. Currently, I have over 1,000 contacts, belong to a dozen different groups, have been recommended by over 50 people, and am an active user of the answers and recently released application sections. I also spend much of my time conducting “best practices” consulting, training and coaching on effective use of LinkedIn for senior executives and front line staff.

With over 30 million LinkedIn users, less than 10 percent actually know how to get the most from this platform. The goal of this article is to serve as a wake up call as much as a future foretold. I believe there are five fundamental reasons as to why the demise of LinkedIn is imminent if there are not critical improvements:

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On Oct. 30^th, with close to 1000 attendees, executive coach Patricia Wheeler of the Levin Group in association with Marshall Goldsmith, interviewed David Nour, author of Relationship Economics (Wiley, September 2008) on their monthly Thought Leader Teleforum on “Social Networking and Leadership Strategy - The Bottom Line.”

“In today’s networked world, relationships are everything! David shows you how to make the most of them. Shows you how to build lasting, mutually-beneficial relationships! Read this book – build your network!” - Marshall Goldsmith, New York Times best-selling author of What Got You Here Won’t Get You There and Executive Coach to Fortune 100 CEOs

Topics such as tracking the quantifiable value of your most strategic – often your most valuable business relationships in a global economy increasingly more disconnected, were discussed.  Highly interactive dialogue with the sold out audience included questions regarding how to prioritizing one’s most critical relationships, key investment strategies in different types and business stature levels of relationships, and specific best practices to derive the highest return on one’s influence, involvement, and impact.

David Nour is a social networking strategist, a thought leader and sought after international speaker on the quantifiable value of business relationships and a senior management advisor to Fortune and Inc. 500 firms.

During their 60-minute conference call, three critical points were addressed:

1. The Quantifiable Value of Your Strategic Relationships
2. Leveraging Your Strategic Relationships to Combat Flight Risk
3. Social Networking Best Practices to Accelerate Adaptive Innovation

Click the Play button below to hear the audio from this session

 

 Though Leader Teleforum [59:45m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I was elated to receive this email – LinkedIn has finally realized that they have the promise and the potential to become a social networking platform, and not simply a “hand-shake” website!

But it didn’t take long to start receiving less than stellar news from each of the apps I tried, which made me ask: do these guys really understand what it takes to succeed in the application arena?

1. It has to work!  Don’t put half-baked stuff up there!
2. Web 2.0 is about self-service – what’s next when it doesn’t work?
3. I’m assuming you get the 1-9-90 phenomenon, so what are you doing to engage big advocates like me to test this stuff before your mass release?
4. Do you have the support infrastructure to support it?
5. You’ll get one chance to create an exceptional experience and unfortunately, today wasn’t it!

I know there are really bright, hard working developers at LinkedIn and each of the respective partner companies, and I commend all of them for extending their reach.

What do you think about LinkedIn Applications?

There are three types of relationships:

• Personal – These are your friends (golf buddies, neighbors, parents at kid’s school, etc.); they like your warts and all and you choose them, making them rather safe.
• Functional – These are people you work with to perform your job or realm of responsibilities.  You build relationships with them, often because you have to (colleagues, customers, suppliers, etc.). You don’t necessarily choose all of them, but because of the context of your relationship, likewise they feel fairly safe.

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I read an interesting comment by Travis Van on Beyond the Hype blog on Tweeter postings and how silly you can look in describing the mundane functions – does anyone really care what you do between the bathroom and the kitchen?  So, I’m doing a couple of experiments on Twitter:

First, those of you who know me, know that I’m a huge believer of trying to add value in every interaction – as such, I’m “tweeting” interesting URLs, engaging website or research papers I’ve read; a contrarian perspective on a specific topic, invites to interesting events, etc.

The second experiment is asking a series of questions around the productive uses of social networking apps such as Twitter.

Two fundamental challenges:

1. I’m getting zero responses to the content I’m putting up; this is quality stuff people.
2. I’m not getting a whole lot of answers to my questions!

As such, I’ve arrived at three conclusions:

1. I’m missing the point on Twitter – maybe what I’m doing between the bathroom and the kitchen is more interesting than a presentation on slideshare.net which really makes you think about our water conservation challenges in the decade ahead, or the Brand Gap!

2. I need to ask better questions?  This one is a life-long mission; not sure it can be addressed in 140 characters!

3. I’m following the wrong people?  Technorati has authority; eBay has Feedback Score; even LinkedIn has InMail Feedback Score – what’s the credibility / relevancy metric on Twitter again?  How do you rank the really interesting tweets vs. the completely useless ones?

In Relationship Economics (Wiley, 2008), I wrote about return on influence and credibility by association.  Can’t help but to wonder what your tweets or the people you’re following say about you?  If you agree that we are all products of the advice we take, here is one for you: take more stock in thinking before you tweet and with whom you engage online, similarly to those you would off-line.  This incongruence is one of the reasons I’m writing about the demise of LinkedIn!

Lastly, I know the World is Flat, but can we create a language filter so my entire Twitter page becomes content that I can actually read?

What types of policies do employers need to have in place to protect themselves from videos made by employees and posted on YouTube?

Q - Do employers have any rights when it comes to limiting what employees say about them in personal videos available for public viewing?

A - Absolutely as most information seen or utilized within an organization is confidential and often not appropriate for public consumption – particularly on YouTube!  Employers do need to have a clear social networking strategy and supporting guidelines outlining acceptable behavior, “dos & don’ts” on content creation & distribution points, and succinct explanation of that which constitutes infringement of non-compliance.

Q - What are some examples of content that employers should just ignore vs. examples of content they can/should respond to with discipline?

A – Social networking has a personal and a professional aspect to it – on the positive side you want employees to have a balanced life, socialize, and go on vacations, so presenting the positive aspects of their lives outside of work online is actually OK.  On the negative side, crude, demeaning, belittling or otherwise inappropriate content referencing the organization by name, brand, or market comparison is simply a dilution of the employer’s reputation capital®.  Specifity drives credibility, so this is really good area for some training of what to & not-to do!

Q - What are the main threats YouTube and other similar services pose to employers? Defamation, public dissemination of proprietary information or other issues?

A – Inaccurate, half-truths, one-sided versions of events, outright misrepresentation, “he-said, she-said” slander, absolute defamation of a manager, a peer, an executive or even board members without merits, sensitive leak of confidential or market-sensitive information (think of a merger or acquisition event, or change of leadership before publically announced).  The positive aspect of social networking sites such as YouTube is that they reduce the barriers to individual publishing; unfortunately, that’s also the negative aspects when discretion isn’t exercised.

What are your thoughts?