ATLANTA - My company has done business with Linkedin for several years. Happily, I might add. I started using Linkedin in 2004 -- even before I really understood how to use it, while most of my recruiter friends insisted that I was insane for using it at all.
But I used it anyway, sensing that Linkedin would someday amount to something. I'm so smart.
Obviously, Linkedin has since become a major force in the recruiting industry, and it has the ability to completely transform and disrupt the executive search business in the coming years. Big time.
Looking back, every time my firm had an opportunity to subscribe to a Linkedin service, we usually went "limit up" on it – meaning, we bought as much of it as we could at the time. And we were rarely disappointed with our returns on these investments.
So last year, when Linkedin approached us about subscribing to their Recruiter tool, we signed the deal. Except that the deal Linkedin pushed us to sign was not a typical one-year deal such as we see from CareerBuilder and Monster. No, Linkedin wanted us to do a three-year minimum on Linkedin Recruiter.
Three years is a lifetime to a paranoid recruiter.
And Linkedin wasn't giving Recruiter away, that's for sure. In fact it was pretty expensive, but it gave us a substantial inventory of InMails -- AKA, the ability for us to communicate directly with anyone in Linkedin's database without going through a string of intermediaries, whether we had a personal relationship with the ultimate recipient or not. So if Barack Obama is on Linkedin and I want to send him an InMail, I can, immediately, confidentially, and without asking three intermediaries to pass my note along. Done.
Slick concept, especially for lazy recruiters. Who needs to cold call when you can just press a button? I'm so smart.
You can get a sense for InMail pricing on this grid.
Now then. Traditionally, my attitude has been that Linkedin is much more than a standard candidate database. Aspects of it more closely resemble online communities. Duh: It's social. In fact, my own Linkedin group, EcommerceJobs.com, has nearly 5000 members and is now the seventh-largest e-commerce group on Linkedin. So Linkedin is of real, serious strategic importance to my firm.
But lately, I wonder if we made the right call by buying thousands of InMails.
The problem boils down to what it is known among direct marketers as List Fatigue, a concept that refers to prospect list that is so over-mailed that the prospects on the list no longer respond to any marketer, no matter how qualified or relevant the marketer may be. It's a simple signal-to-noise problem.
Tonight I spent 45 minutes going through my Linkedin e-mail inbox. What I found was appalling. Most of the correspondence was spam, outright. Totally impersonal and irrelevant to me, yet because I "knew" many of the senders through social media, I felt compelled in some cases to acknowledge their outreach.
Introducing FRAM: Spam from social media friends.
It was like spam, but much worse. It often came with a weird sense of obligation. For example, one of my (4,190) first-degree connections asked me to write a short recommendation about him before passing along his bio to a hiring manager in an industry that's totally unrelated to my own (ecommerce). Sure, I could have been a dick and archived his InMail, but I'm in the karma business. Plus I'm not a dick.
Several InMails were from PR flacks advising me of some new development with their software clients. Many InMails were from social media experts inviting me to attend a webinar. And so on.
All told, I had 47 InMails, and less than 5 contained REAL opportunities.
And immediately, I was overcome with the fear that people must feel the exactly same way about MY InMails -- all of which cost me nearly ten bucks a pop to send. I'm not in the business of annoying people, and I don't think anyone should be. Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not "over" Linkedin, and I don't think it has jumped the shark. But there's something about Linkedin that reminds me of that Yogi Berra quote about his favorite restaurant being "so popular that no one goes there anymore." I can see that comment applying to Linkedin at some point down the road.
How far down the road I can't say, although I'm about to enter year 2 of my three year deal. Which means that I'm obligated to "Fram" Linkedin members for at least another two years, or watch thousands of dollars worth of InMails expire, unused.
Which is probably what I'll do.