Open letter to Microsoft re LinkedIn
Dear Microsoft
Congratulations on your purchase of LinkedIn!
I am sure you have lots of exciting plans for the ‘professionals’ network’ including additional features and integrating with your products - building in video conferencing using Skype would be amazing. But I digress, before all the shiny new stuff would you be so kind to fix a few things?
Don’t get me wrong. I love LinkedIn and find it extremely useful for networking and winning business. Only on Monday I was running a social media workshop at a University which was business I obtained through LinkedIn.
But there are some parts of LinkedIn that just don’t work; they are broken so it would be great if you could sort them out. Below are 10 for you to get started on. Thank you.
1) Reminders under Relationship on profiles do not work. I’m not the only one to notice this - read this in LinkedIn Help. I’m sure lots of people have missed follow-up calls and meetings as a result.
2) When adding a Comment it’s often helpful to add a link but this isn’t possible. Over on Facebook you can add links, images and even video.
3) The Headline on the Profile under Name is a useful way of making a personal statement. However, to add or edit is not easy as only the first few words are displayed and the complete headline is impossible to see. The field is not long enough and needs to be extended.
4) When I invite someone to connect and wish to state ‘We’ve done business together’ it would be helpful and logical if my current business - Intranet Future - was at the top, to make it easy to select. However, for some reason it’s 4th in the list of companies I’ve worked for. However, when I ask for a recommendation it’s correctly at the top.
5) It would be nice to be able to post an update on my Company Page or write a blog post for Pulse on the LinkedIn app on my Samsung S7. Neither are possible which is surprising given the importance of mobile.
6) I like to congratulate people when they obtain a new job but not sure why I often get a reminder a few days later asking me to do exactly that.
7) If you’re working through search results and following up by InMail there’s a handy box on the right showing the next search result. It would be handy to be able to look at this profile after sending each InMail. However, as soon as you send an InMail it disappears!
8) There’s an option to use return to send a message which is handy. But once selected you are then asked every time you send a message if you are sure you want to send the message!
9) Message history is often incomplete under Relationship and in Messaging. This can lead to difficulties if you start a conversation with someone assuming you’ve never spoken to them before, only for past messages to appear just after you’ve hit Send.
10) It’s an established feature of social networks that you select the date stamp to view the update on its own new page and indeed this used to be the case on LinkedIn. But click on the date stamp now and nothing happens, so it’s not possible to send a direct link to an update that could be of interest to a colleague or which you wish to post on social media or include in a newsletter.
I look forward to seeing you make progress with LinkedIn and look forward to seeing you take it to the next level.
Yours faithfully
Jonathan Pollinger
@intranetfuture
029 2078 9139
Note to reader: If you have discovered over functions of LinkedIn that don’t work, please post them in the Comments below. Thank you.
