LinkedIn.com Answers
March 6th, 2007
In yet another example of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return of the Same, I’ve written about LinkedIn.com Answers before. I’ve even written about another site, MarketingProfs.com that provides a venue for asking questions then attempts to reward the people that give out the best answers. I can’t say I’m a fanatical user of either but I have been awarded “best answer status” on both systems several times now.
The point of this blog entry is if you are awarded the best answer by the person asking the question, that information can appear on your profile. You have the option of not having this information visible. However if other people think you are an expert in say venture capital financing, why would you hide that information from your LinkedIn profile?
According to LinkedIn.com Answers I currently have expertise in:
- Internationalization and Localization
- Guerrilla Marketing
- Internet Marketing
- Organizational Development
- Starting Up
Not too bad, I’m not sure if these are the five areas I know the most about, but the questions are put into categories by the asker. One thing that differs between LinkedIn.com and MarketingProfs.com is anyone can ask a question on LinkedIn. On MarketingProfs.com, in order to ask a question, you have to have already accrued expert points then you have to offer those points as a reward for answering the question. As a result LinkedIn.com has suffered from some less than high quality questions being asked, or the same questioned being asked repeatedly, or even people using LinkedIn.com Answers to do market research. People have admitted that to me, I’m not sure what the terms of usage has to say about that.
LinkedIn.com Answers is no more but there are plenty of other question and answer websites out there. Quora, Stack Overflow, even Reddit is used for this purpose. If you have any questions or answers you can leave them below.
This entry was originaly posted on , it was last edited on and is filed under: Technology and tagged: LinkedIn, Online Social Networks, Self Marketing.
LinkedIn Answers is being canceled. So much for my expertise. Now I’m suppose to hangout at Quora, Yahoo Answers, or maybe StackOverflow. I think the best thing to do is to have your own domain and demonstrate your expertise there, then link back from these other sites, as you never know when content you entered in a site you don’t control will disappear.
I answered another question and while doing so noticed a link which attempted to explain the benefits of answering questions and becoming an “expert” according to LinkedIn.com: