Online Communication And The Mirror Effect

Welcome to episode 151 at the end of another traumatic week for LinkedIn and it’s new design!

Following on from last weeks episode, I want to dig a bit deeper into what communication techniques work and what really don’t work on LinkedIn.

But first…..

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Workplace from Facebook is now live…..will it cause LinkedIn problems?

Are LinkedIn understaffed and overworked?….or just low quality or ignorant? I suspect they are severely overworked and understaffed….ironic for a site that makes 60% of its revenue from recruitment!

LinkedIn Salary - Did you know that premium users no longer have to add their salary to be able to use the salary feature. Salary can be found in the ‘More menu’

New Desktop Design Update

Now that the majority of users have the new UI, the heat is really turning up on LinkedIn…members are really not happy!

Someone has even created an online petition! New LinkedIn - Petition - Bring Back Tagging, Advanced Search and Rankings!

Whilst I think it’s important to provide LinkedIn with feedback, I don’t think ranting helps (other than the person that wrote it might feel better!). The above petition does not really tackle the most important or realistic issues. Let’s be realistic, LinkedIn are not likely to bring back advanced search and tagging (which is not actually related to the new UI) has moved to Sales Navigator so they are not going to reverse that and rankings (a pointless feature anyway) are hardly worth raising a petition about!

I’m not happy with the new design either but I am trying to be constructive and find realistic solutions. The biggest issue for me is quality - there are just far too many bugs or features that seem to have been accidentally forgotten! This is unforgivable and LinkedIn need to ‘up their game’ and sort these quickly.

Here is my list of bugs, it is worth noting that this list was almost double the length in November, so things are slowly getting better.

Bugs or ‘forgotten’ features

• Hovering over names (quoted in updates) does not open up a preview box.
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• You can’t see who shared your article
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• Notifications do not take you to the exact place in a thread
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• Typing responses to comments is impossible to see
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• Recommendation order can’t be changed - despite appearing though it can views of post’ on homepage is totally out of sync with the real number.
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• Page load times are slow for many
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• When someone comments on an image update you can’t see the image in your feed…making the comment often impossible to understand

Have you found any more? Let me know if I have missed any.

New UI fact: Did you know that emoji’s in name fields make the person impossible to find in a name search? Remove all emoji’s from your name field (they should never have been there in the first place!)

Communication. The Mirror Effect How many times do we receive a message on LinkedIn or email that shows a clear lack of understand as to our interests and needs? How often do we see a message that is clearly a standardised format, sent to multiple recipients?

What is going on here? People find it harder to communicate online because they have no signals to read, or at least they think they don’t…..so we get the mirror effect! The computer screen acts like a mirror and all we see is our own need and wants….net result is poor, ineffective communication.

Let’s consider a better example; Mike Richards is specialist treasury recruiter.

Mike noticed that following an article he wrote on LinkedIn (aimed at being of value to treasury professionals) he was getting a lot of new followers. He sifted through these followers and picked out those that were of particular interest. He found 22 interesting followers, all potential clients or candidates. He then sent them all a personalised invitation to connect which read as follows;

I noticed you recently reviewed my profile maybe after reading one of my articles, you may also have seen this post about improving your LinkedIn profile if it helps you? http://www.treasuryrecruitment.com/10_linkedin_tips/ Feel free to connect if you want to? Regards Mike @ MR Recruitment

All 22 accepted!

This is no surprise because he acted on a clear signal that they were interested in him, rather than assuming they would be. In addition he provides value in the link with some LinkedIn tips and the very ‘non pushy’ line ‘feel free to connect if you want to’ Mike knows his market and the tone of his invitation is perfectly suited to Treasury professionals.

This is what I mean by effective communication. Move beyond the mirror effect and communicate in a compassionate, person centred way.

I would love to hear about more examples, both good and bad. Please drop me a line on LinkedIn or to mark@linkedinformed.com

Mentioned in this episode:

This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.