LinkedIn tells me I’ve been a member (aka, had a free profile) since January 25, 2010. Twice I’ve subscribed to the job seeker upgrade ($19.99/mo) when exploring career change opportunities. Once, for an extended period of time, I joined groups and mined connections in an effort to populate a list of prospective clients for an employer.
Two of the features that made the connection mining successful were Notes and Tags.
- With Notes, I could identify how I found or knew the connection and what communication exchanges we’d had.
- With Tags, I could create a collection of features by which to define each connection that would make it easy for me to search for smaller subsets of clients based on what my employer-at-the-time was focusing in sales and products.
And today, January 11, 2017, LinkedIn sent me an email to tell me, since they know I use Notes and Tags, that they are discontinuing the two features but that, if I subscribe to their new service Sales Navigator, I’ll still be able to capture similar information.
I’ve watched LinkedIn struggle to find/create an identity for itself as part of the rise of social media. But its continued attempt to be both a sales CRM, competing with giants like Salesforce and Zoho, and an ATS, competing with giants like Indeed and iCIMS, while providing no content filters to minimize political, entertainment, and personal ad posts is crippling this platform.
Yep, I said it. LinkedIn’s programming and development priority towards revenue-generating strategic repositioning should be to create and implement an automated and a manual system for filtering content.
