
How LinkedIn Just Made Ten Million People Feel Special - mwetzler
https://keen.io/blog/42532210123/how-linkedin-just-made-10-million-people-feel-special
======
Quarrelsome
They failed quite spectacularly for me:

"congratulations! You were one of our first 500,000 members to register in
Iceland."

Iceland - population of 300,000.

~~~
azylman
I think they mean that, out of their first 500,000 members, you were one of
the first to register in Iceland. As in, you were one of the first people in
Iceland to sign up for LinkedIn, and you did it very early.

~~~
mapleoin
Then they still failed at English.

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georgemcbay
LinkedIn are the kings of this sort of misleading information. I find it quite
annoying but I suspect it is probably effective for them.

See also: the way they play with the "how many people have clicked on your
profile in that last XYZ days" to always make it seem like you've got a lot of
people clicking.

~~~
el_cuadrado
It is not misleading information, it is brilliant marketing. Gotta give them
that.

~~~
georgemcbay
The fact that it is effective marketing doesn't nullify the fact that it is
misleading. In fact, those two properties go hand-in-hand most of the time
(though not always).

~~~
biotech
How is it misleading? Saying that someone is in the "Top 5%" most viewed
profiles is pretty straightforward. Just because there are a lot of people in
the top 5% doesn't make it "misleading".

~~~
georgemcbay
It is misleading because it is clearly playing off the fact that most people
won't do the math and will think 5% puts them in an elite group.

Misleading doesn't necessarily mean lying.

~~~
ghshephard
Those people still were viewed more than 95% of all the rest, it doesn't
matter if it's a group of 100, 1,000 or 1 million people - still pretty
impressive.

Now I'm wondering what I need to do to market myself there...

~~~
mwetzler
Consider how many LinkedIn users are active. Probably fewer than 25%. I'm
guessing the top 10% are the people who use LinkedIn a few times per month
(like I do).

People who use LinkedIn actively will get way more views since they will be
adding connections and viewing other people's pages more (LinkedIn emails
people your contact info if you view their page).

At first, being top 5% made me feel popular. But considering the pool includes
users who created an account 3 years ago and haven't touched it since, I'm not
so sure.

~~~
JacobAldridge
Not disimilar to somebody informing me the other day that I'm in the top 2% of
HN users by karma. Objectively pointless, and subjectively relies on ignoring
the thousands of old or throwaway accounts to boost my ego (which is already
healthy enough).

------
incision
I'm routinely surprised by how religiously some of my LinkedIn connections
update their profiles. For many of them, it's surely their primary social
network.

LinkedIn is basically a contact list for me. I've always found the site
cluttered and a bit clumsy, not something I want to use. Though, I do get some
amusement out of seeing people predictably check my profile after meeting for
the first time.

Things like the newish endorsement feature actually bother me. It's all very
gamey, counters and "XP bars" everywhere begging your effort to make them
increment.

I certainly understand such carrots to induce more people to make more
connections, have more engagement with the site and ideally drop $240-900/yr.
for premium accounts.

Personally, I'd be more inclined to do that if I thought connections,
endorsements, profile views and whatnot were actually meaningful.

As it is, the only thing that seems to demonstrate any real effort/connection
are recommendations which are given no more priority in the activity feed than
endorsements and appear towards the bottom of profiles.

~~~
corin_
The new skill endorsements are hilariously pointless - back when I had it
enabled I didn't see a single person endorse me for skills they actually know
about, but plenty of people were using it pointlessly. People I know but
haven't worked directly with in those areas. I remember I had a meeting a
month ago with two people I'd never met before, a day later we were
connections, a day later they both endorsed me for a bunch of stuff from "PR"
to "events management" - how did they even think they could justify clicking
those things for me?

However LinkedIn is still pretty good at letting you get what you want out of
it. I've not yet spoken to anyone who doesn't share my/your view of "these
skill endorsements are hilariously dumb", and consequently we've disabled them
- no longer are they seen on my profile, nor do I get emails about people
endorsing me.

Number of profile views isn't meaningful, but who viewed your profile can be -
I'm one of the ones dropping $500/yr on my account, I'd say 60% of my
reasoning is for the InMails, 20% is seeing exactly who viewed my profile, 20%
is that whether it's logical or not, people who don't know you do look at the
little premium badge on your profile and think very slightly differently of
you.

~~~
trafficlight
I only get endorsements from people who have no idea what I really do.

~~~
amorphid
Trafficlight, amorphid has endorsed you in crime fighting.

Return the favor! Does amorphid know organic cat grooming?

~~~
troels
You're laughing, but the other day LinkedIn actually asked me to endorse one
of my contacts for "Crime fighting".

~~~
amorphid
Is your contact named Bruce Wayne?

~~~
troels
No, but he _is_ a police officer.

------
adambenayoun
This is Genius because Linkedin has been working really hard on one feature
that could possibly make a lot of users upgrade.

The fact that we always want to know who "peaked" at our profiles (I'm sure
half of your secretly wanted to know at some point of your life who looked at
your facebook profile right?) leads people to upgrade.

A funny thing happened to me a few months ago, I was browsing linkedin and
landed on a old client's profile and I was wondering what was going on with
him and his projects.

A few hours later I got an email from him saying that he got a notification
that I was viewing his profile and that made him wondered what is going on
with me (and our company). That interaction made me think that this single
feature is genius, it helps reconnect with people (some will argue that it
might be creepy).

~~~
Terretta
> _we always want to know who "peaked" at our profiles_

They _piqued_ your interest in who _peeked_ at your profile -- it worked, your
interest has _peaked_.

<http://www.writing.com/main/books/entry_id/352725>

~~~
Shorel
That was picky.

------
donretag
I feel suddenly so left out. :)

I actually do my best to minimize my appearance in search. No job descriptions
besides titles, no skills, no visible endorsements, no recommendations. I
basically use LinkedIn to keep track of ex-colleagues, but that does not stop
recruiters from still finding and contacting me.

------
kellyhclay
Smart marketing move. LinkedIn just made 10 million people wonder, if they are
in the top 5% of most viewed profiles, who exactly did view their profile?
Curious to see how many users end up converting to Pro from this "spam".

------
Renaud
Apparently, their marketing efforts try very hard to make everyone feel
special: I've just received an email exactly like the one mentioned in the
blog, congratulating me: "You were one of our first million members in Hong
Kong." I don't even use LinkedIn, that's just a dummy account with no
information.

I can imagine their marketing department trying very hard to make sure they
find some kind of positively-sounding (but ultimately not very interesting)
stat about every single account so they can justify sending that email to
everyone.

------
azakai
> Then I realized top 5% isn’t really that significant.

It's 1 out of 20. Is that significant or not? Depends on your perspective. But
it certainly is not objectively insignificant.

> And I noticed from their letter that LinkedIn has 200M members. 5% of 200M
> is 10M.

And if there were 1B linkedin users, it would be even more. But 5% is still 1
out of 20. Again, if you find that impressive or not is up to you, but it is a
very clear, nonmisrepresented percentage.

~~~
mwetzler
Obviously 5% is 1 in 20. But 5% of what? All accounts ever created on
LinkedIn? Really curious about their MAU. I'd bet it's something like 20M.
Meaning, if you're in the "top" you're really just one of the people that uses
LinkedIn regularly :)

In any case I find the campaign to be extremely effective. Making 20M people
feel special is impressive.

------
selectout
I got this email (as did millions of others) but the real surprise is that it
doesn't mean much to make that by actual profile views. Thinking back I don't
remember a month where I had more than maybe 100 people view my profile,
average month was probably around 50-60. If you think about it, most people
get that probably weekly on facebook and daily on twitter.

------
logn
Sort of like the OkCupid emails which tell you you're a sexier member than
most and you'll be displayed more prominently in search results. Humanity.

~~~
noname123
Sigh. That has never happened to me. But perhaps on that site, I should be
more concerned with conversion rate when recipients respond. Need to make a
bed-side Google Analytics plugin that tracks such transactions.

------
prezjordan
I am the 5% :) Which is a shame, because I really don't like their service,
and my spot would be better reserved for someone else.

~~~
mwetzler
I don't feel like I use it very much. I wonder how many of the 200M users are
inactive. My guess is most of them. The top 10% is probably anyone who used
LinkedIn more than a few times last year. Not to put a damper on your
achievement :)

~~~
Turing_Machine
The only time I ever use it is if someone who I know is competent endorses me
for something. I figure that person may be looking for a job, so I endorse
them back to help them out.

------
evan_
Reminds me of the old Point "Top 5% of all web sites" award graphic that
seemingly every website boasted in 1995.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycos_TOP_5%25>

~~~
mwetzler
Pretty sure I was proudly touting one of those on my old tripod site :)

------
yumraj
I'm in the top 1%, can I feel special ;)

P.S. Looks like at least two versions were sent out, one with 5% and another
with 1% that I got. Were there other?

From a marketing standpoint it worked, since now people are talking about it.

~~~
unreal37
I think a 10% email was sent out too, if I can believe one of my friends.

------
jgh
... And 190 million people feel not special :(

------
gkoberger
OKCupid does something similar with attractiveness: they email you to
congratulate you if you're one of the top 50%. Based on all my friends who
have bragged, it works. I always thought that was a great way to flatter
people into using the site.

~~~
cwilson
I came here to post this. I just found the email I received back when I was
single, specifically on 10/12/11, and this is what it looked like:
<http://cl.ly/image/2A2N41383T38>

This was clearly an ego boost, though not something you tweet about or post on
Facebook (the taboo of online dating + sounding like a major douche).

OkCupid has been doing stuff like this with data for a really long time and
they deserve some credit as well.

~~~
beambot
Based on the text they're going to recommend more attractive people to one
another... I wonder if couples' attractiveness is highly correlated. That
would be some interesting data. They should publish it.

------
dfc
_"The analytics team didn’t do a bad job crunching all that pageview data
either."_

I do not do a lot of analytics (ie close to nil). Is it really that hard to
have a counter for the number of visits to each person's profile?

~~~
mwetzler
A counter is one way to do it, but they probably use event data because it is
much richer and more powerful. I'm guessing they don't just store a generic
tick every time someone views a page.

If they're doing it right, they're storing everything about the person viewing
a page, and everything about the person whose page they are viewing, every
time a page view happens. That way they can run analysis on the pages
themselves as well as the page viewers' activities.

The reason it's impressive is that they have 200M users doing X number of page
views per day, over the course of an entire year.

Let's say the average user does 1 pageview per day. 200M x 1 x 365 = 73B
events.

Now they're sorting those 73B events by the pages viewed so they can sort out
which pages got the most views.

It's not rocket science, but it's pretty cool IMO :)

~~~
dfc
200M daily active users?

~~~
mwetzler
Certainly not. Most users probably do 3 clicks per year. But some probably do
many, many more.

1 pageview per user per day might be way off, but seems reasonable.

------
oniTony
I actually got the same email for being in the "top 10%".

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pasbesoin
That looks straight out of the "commemorating another 5 years" token drawer of
the BigCorps I worked for. Um, gag?

Talk about a skeumorphism better left behind...

------
tjbiddle
More than that. My roommate received an email for being in the top 10%. Great
marketing/reengagement strategy from LinkedIn though!

------
BrianEatWorld
LinkedIn takes a lesson from OKCupid.

------
hudster
I got the 1% mail, which in my experience of 2012 means getting exponentially
more recruiter spam

