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Part 2: The LinkedIn Experiment

By Alicia Wanless on 16/12/2013 2 Comments

Premium Accounts

Sales can be tempting. LinkedIn lured me into a premium account with a deep discount for the first month.

Without a monthly contract and instead offering terms that allowed for cancelation anytime within a billing cycle, there really didn’t seem like a good reason to say no. Well, except for the feedback of friends who had also upgraded and found little use for the service.

Curiosity, it’s an expensive habit, ($31 monthly for a Job Seeker Premium Account, $26 for a Business upgrade). Thus, earlier this fall did I upgrade.

TheLIExperiment

Other than letting me see who was looking at my profile – which really just feeds a mixture of vanity and paranoia – all a premium account offered otherwise was a limited number of InMails a month.  The InMail program allows a subscriber to send messages to people outside their network – if the intended recipient allows for such stranger danger (many so-called influencers do not).

Conan

There were other features too, but none that really applied to my needs, which were to simply grow an existing network beyond the people I already knew.

Perhaps the limited number of targeted searches are more useful for head hunters, and likewise the featured candidate offering might help some job seekers who do well on those blind applications in a pool of thousands.

All I discovered in this experiment was that criticizing the LinkedIn influencer program on a post by Conan O’Brien will garner more interest in a profile than any paid-for service offering.

This, and the overwhelming majority (90+%) of strangers who look at my profile are men – which might account for the LinkedIn suggestion to use pictures of women in paid ads on the network.

Have you upgraded to a LinkedIn Premium account? How has your experience been? What do you see as the main benefit?

About Author

Alicia Wanless
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La Generalista is the online identity of Alicia Wanless – a researcher and practitioner of strategic communications for social change in a Digital Age. Alicia is the director of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. With a growing international multi-stakeholder community, the Partnership aims to foster evidence-based policymaking to counter threats within the information environment. Wanless is currently a PhD Researcher at King’s College London exploring how the information environment can be studied in similar ways to the physical environment. She is also a pre-doctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, and was a tech advisor to Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. Her work has been featured in Lawfare, The National Interest, Foreign Policy, and CBC.

Related Posts

  • Time for Transparency From Digital Platforms, But What Does That Really Mean?

  • Why Are Authoritarians Framing International Approaches to Disinformation?

  • What’s Working and What Isn’t in Researching Influence Operations?

2 Comments

  1. Dietwald Claus on 19/12/2013 6:49 am

    So, basically – it’s a great service for women looking for a date

    • Alicia Wanless on 24/12/2013 8:38 pm

      Could be! Of course, to the best of my knowledge, no one has tried to pick me up yet. They just look…

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    La Generalista is the online identity of Alicia Wanless – a researcher and practitioner of strategic communications for social change in a Digital Age. Learn more about her work here

    Alicia Wanless is the director of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. With a growing international multi-stakeholder community, the Partnership aims to foster evidence-based policymaking to counter threats within the information environment. Wanless is currently a PhD Researcher at King’s College London exploring how the information environment can be studied in similar ways to the physical environment. She is also a pre-doctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, and was a tech advisor to Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. Her work has been featured in Lawfare, The National Interest, Foreign Policy, and CBC.

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    La Generalista is the pen name of Alicia Wanless - a strategic communications professional who studies how we shape the information space and it, in turn, shapes us.

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