Alienating your best fans: Music, P2P, & LinkedIn
Filed in archive Society & Public Policy on January 31, 2006
What does social networking and music have in common? Quite a lot. Consider the meteoric rise of MySpace. Music is entwined with popular culture, interests, and friends, the stuff of networking.
There also are similarities in the leaders of these industries. Monopolies and success, separate and together, protect archaic business models and breed arrogance, which alienate customers, which impacts the bottom line.
We've seen it in the music business. RIAA, representing the top 4 music labels, continues its campaign of terror (oops, education) to sue people who share files. These are their best fans, and many are artists themselves - people who explore, experience, and collect tens of thousands of songs to fill their PCs and iPods.
RIAA intentionally confuses cause and effect to influence public policy. They say such users don't respect artists and and hurt label revenues. In truth it is the consumer who is talking. It is the labels they don't respect. The consumer is saying the industry is not being competitive and serving their interests. And in a digital open market economy, the consumer is king.
In the world of online business networking linkedin is the heavy, having grown now almost to 5 million members. Many people are seeing ongoing LinkedIn changes as arrogant and alienating their best fans, the top networkers.
Consider this response from one LinkedIn user, similar to many I have received.
"Linkedin has really pissed me off. I will not renew my paid subscription.
They have not kept a single promise - esp the with 24 hour tech support
promised. I can't say enough how angry I am with them and their nuisance
emails to spank me about widening my network. We are their base and made
them grow as thay have and they owe us some minimal respect "
Substitute a few words and that's the same sentiment of a typical P2P file sharer.
Marc
Your LinkedIn DaddyFeel free to connect to me at IamYour(at)LinkedInDaddy.com
Tags: LinkedIn p2p
Vote for Alienating your best fans: Music, P2P, & LinkedIn:
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Rating: 6.67 out of 3 vote(s) cast.
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Response from:
Konstantin Guericke
(01/31/06 9:34pm)
Response from:
Jonathan
(02/01/06 8:33am)
Konstantin,
Not that I don't like the changes to LinkedIn, I believe they do develop value to endorsements; however this is the only official LinkedIn comment I have been able to find on reasons for change. Maybe your marketing team needs to put a bit of thought in communicating to LinkedIn users.
Same thing can be derived from the Sony 'rootkit'...
Better to inform on your intentions than face the music later...
You will find plenty of topics in LinkedIn forums asking for a choice on this one...
Not that I don't like the changes to LinkedIn, I believe they do develop value to endorsements; however this is the only official LinkedIn comment I have been able to find on reasons for change. Maybe your marketing team needs to put a bit of thought in communicating to LinkedIn users.
Same thing can be derived from the Sony 'rootkit'...
Better to inform on your intentions than face the music later...
You will find plenty of topics in LinkedIn forums asking for a choice on this one...
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However, we have a responsibility towards our user base as a whole to make sure they have a good experience. And when users are accepting fewer invitations and complaing more about invitations from people they don't know, we have to act.
Most invitations on LinkedIn get accepted. However, not surprisingly, most of the unwanted invitations come from people who send out thounsands or even tens of thousands of incitations, so we are doing our part to discourage spam.
The icon showing the connections is there to provide useful information about how recommended someone is. Most users don't think that someone with 5,000 connections is any more trustworthy than someone with 300 connections, so we don't want to imply there is and possibly encourage users to invite people they don't know.