Gamifying LinkedIn to drive engagement?

LinkedIn has changed again recently… 

Once upon a time you chose your key skills/ tags. You encouraged a few people you had worked with to write a few words of public recommendation. End of story.

Yet with recent changes, LinkedIn is encouraging members to endorse the skills on the profiles of your contacts in a broader, less effort intense way.  Whether this is a good thing or not in a world where wisdom of the crowd arguably counts more than ever in the way we process and trust information is debatable.  Does it make your claimed self-defined skills less credible if no-one endorses them? What if those skills were gained a while back working in a different context, and possibly amongst a crowd of people less digitally active or savyy?

I don’t have the answers but the questions arise.

What’s also interesting from my observations and a few conversations with friends. Is how LinkedIn have gone about encouraging these quick click “light” endorsements: On a site that’s generally more serious and functional in mindset, and all the better for not being plagued by endless achievement based status posts from the Zynga game of the month, all of a sudden appeared some pictures of my contacts with skills asking me to click to endorse person X with skill Y. 

There are rather a lot of parallels with many of the big social games… easy, quick, engaging. Photos and the question “Does X know about Y” make it hard not to at the very least entertain the thought if not respond.  It makes you think about your contacts and is really rather compulsive… once you start and the picture/skills tiles keep refreshing, it’s really rather easy to lose 5 minutes, just waiting to see who / what pops up next, given some of the skills would appear to be drawn from profile data beyond just the keyword tags.

 Smart experience design from LinkedIn at the very least.

 Maybe it’s the social gaming element that is behind the fact that so far, based admittedly on a small panel of my friends, over only a short period of time since the feature went live, that there seem to be more endorsements from women than men, and they are generally fair / on occasion generous ones.

 Gender bias towards gaming behaviours and benefit of the doubt/ assumption that if they were doing XYZ job then they must know about said subject seem to prevail.

Right, perhaps I’ll hop off and play some more. It’s rather fun. 

Practising what I preach...

Sometimes it's good to take a step back from the day job(s) and apply all those principles one advocates at work to yourself.  Data visualisation is something I'm very interested in and believe we will see more and more of so I spend a lot of time exploring and thinking about how it can be harnessed as a concept. I recently had a play with the profile the visualize.me beta generated of my career history and decided that for all it's hover over interactivity, there was still room for improvement. The things a geek does for fun.

So I sat down and thought about how I could tell my cv story a different way. Having been around the block a few times now and worked in many different places across lots of different industries and countries I have a broad international marketing & communications skill base that is flexible and can be applied in many different ways. Whilst the non-linearity of the path causes the younger lesser-spotted recruiters to scratch their heads because I'm not much of one for box fitting, there was method in my madness along the way, and it is the capabilities acquired along that journey which captures the attention of those with rather more experience and imagination. 

These days I'm rather sworn to the digital cause, it's endless evolution keeps me on my toes and my curiosity constantly piqued, so taking the tools of my trade to task, what could I draw upon to turn all those words that no-one is ever going to read in a short-attention span world into something more visual? Something that tells a broad story at a glance? Well, here's the jpeg non-hyperlinked and very definitely beta version of what I've come up with so far... Food for thought. 

Sadly, there's no functionality within LinkedIn to share it, (at least with a basic account), beyond hyperlinking this post under the "my portfolio" section - a development opportunity for them perhaps.  As we all get more and more visual / multi-media about how we sell ourselves, then surely their platform needs to evolve and embrace that?

Looking for a new job? Try this....

 Someone just sent me this which has tickled me greatly.




Love it!  (Although personally I would suggest that if you are not maintaining a profile on LinkedIn you should too, just as good practice, irrespective of whether you are jobhunting or not).

Apply the same principles to people looking for info on the category / product area your brand operates.  Are you prepared to pay to insert your brand message in those broader-than-your-brand-name searches, so that you put yourself in the running for the click? I'd be seriously thinking about it.  Otherwise you are missing a heck of a lot of opportunities potentially.

Perhaps I'd better go and set up that Adwords account so no-one mistakes me with my alter-ego landscape gardener in Wales :-) Or the one in Brisbane, or the one in Kent, or the 23 year old that I found on Facebook.  It raises interesting questions about your personal social web brand management strategy.
I have some deliberate views on that topic, but I'll save them for another day.