New on LinkedIn

The weekly LinkedIn update on MrShafrir.com brings yet another new release -- LinkedIn Answers.

Before I get to that, let's talk once more about how LinkedIn releases a new offering: they just put it up on your home page. I've seen a few things come and go, but I imagine they get some pretty immediate feedback on user acceptance and adoption. Setting the expectation that things are dynamic on your LinkedIn homepage is also good strategy -- it gives LinkedIn the chance to use their live site as a testing ground. A virtual petri dish, if you will.

So, back to LinkedIn answers. At first glance, it looks similar to something like a Yahoo! Answers. You ask a question, the "community" gets to answer. Your answers, unless you choose to "Answer Privately", are posted for all to see. I don't yet see the capability to reply to a posted answer, making this less conversation/message board/thread focused, and more "I want a big information dump" slanted. Questions are divided into sub-categories like "Finance and Accounting", "Marketing and Sales", and "Hiring and Human Resources".

There is also the chance to become an "expert" in your field by having your answers voted as the best answer. It looks like the more times your answer is voted "best" to a particular question, the higher you move up the "expert" field.

I did see some questions being answered by salespeople looking to pimp their own products. That is to be expected. I'm not necessarily opposed to people adding a link to their own site or their phone number at the bottom of their answer, but, and this is a big "but", the signal-to-noise ratio tends to get wildly out of hand when people start treating these forums as their personal billboards. I also noticed that questions asked and answers given show up the respective LinkedIn profiles for the asker and answerer.

As far as traction, last night there were 5 pages of questions and this morning there were already 29. One question had 13 answers. Of course, this feature is less than 24 hours old, so those stats are pretty useless.

Here's a screenshot of what showed up on my LinkedIn homepage:

There was also a subtle change last night to text ad for Execunet at the top of the page. Whereas before the ad was job seeker focused (encouraging job seekers to look at jobs that paid $150k+), last night (and this morning) the ad now offers a "Complimentary $100k+ job post". Why LinkedIn would cannibalize their own paid job postings is beyond me, but the money must be pretty good. Whatever potentially drives recruiters away from posting jobs on and to Execunet seems like a strategic error when LinkedIn for Jobs is really starting to gain a lot of traction in the online recruiting world (especially when that text link is RIGHT next to an ad encouraging you to "Learn more about recruiting on LinkedIn).

Here's a screen shot of that:

UPDATE: Speaking of biting the hand that feeds you -- I've noticed more than a few recruiters posting job openings (for free) as "Questions" in the Hiring and Human Resources section. Crafty!