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How to Become a Top Influencer on LinkedIn

August 11th, 2010 · 25 Comments

Social Network Experiment With Expected Results - Social Media Converging on the ‘Most Popular’ Common Denominator

A couple of weeks ago when LinkedIn launched its new group user interface (UI), most of the moderators of larger LinkedIn Groups, including myself were extremely disappointed. Unlike professional discussion boards of the past where discussion threads had a longer life span and were more specific in subject matter, requiring expert knowledge of the few, the new interface was clearly intended to encourage everyone to participate more.

There’s nothing wrong with everyone participating in certain social media. If everyone blogs that’s quite ok, you simply subscribe only to those blogs that interest you. Also there are places in social media, like on Facebook and especially Twitter where comments like “enjoying a cabernet tonight” are viewed as completely acceptable and relevant.

The value of LinkedIn groups on the other hand had been that while fewer individuals were doing the talking at any one time, more meaningful expert level knowledge was being shared.

Interestingly, in a poll I conducted among the 9,000 members of the Next Gen Market Research group on LinkedIn, among the 87 who responded, initial opinion of the new group user interface among users was far more favorable than that expressed by the moderators (see chart below).



I understood why LinkedIn might find the Twitter and Facebook way attractive. If more members are participating, that means more traffic and eyeballs for advertisers.

But was this really LinkedIn’s intentions with the new User Interface?

One of the key additions to the new LinkedIn Group UI was the prominently displayed “Top Influencers This Week” panel (example below). Obviously one of the key rewards of social media is social credit, and it was clear to me LinkedIn intended to use this panel to encourage behavior they saw as proper.

My hypothesis was that if I posted a question or two that anyone could answer I would immediately be the top influencer in that group for a longer period of time, whereas more serious discussion threads requiring expert knowledge of the few would quickly disappear from the forum.

To test my hypothesis I posted 1-3 simple questions between the NGMR group I moderate on LinkedIn as well as several other groups for professional market researchers which I belong (including MRB and MRGA). The questions were simply:

  1. What 1 or 2 words come to mind when you think of market research?
  2. What animal would market research be?
  3. What flower would market research be?

[Note that the same three questions could be asked in any topic group on Linkedin.]

While the first question was most successful, all questions were popular and generated over 200 responses. I’ve included word clouds of the responses below. Admittedly they were more interesting than I had initially anticipated.

I was able to maintain the position of “Top-Influencer” in all three groups for several weeks, keeping my questions at the top while other more serious questions dropped from the forum not to be seen again.

I’m all for networking small talk and getting to know all of my fellow research professionals. However, is it just me or have we lost something as all three major social networks seem to be converging on the ‘most popular’ common denominator?

@TomHCAnderson

[PS. To everyone who responded to my questions on LinkedIn, Thank you so much. My intent with this experiment was not to offend anyone. As you might imagine considering the audience, the answers were far more considered and interesting than you might expect from other groups. I have created 3 word clouds showing frequencies of key words in each thread below.]

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Tags: #marketresearch #mr · Linkedin · Market Research · Marketing · Marketing research · NGMR · SNS · Social Media · Social Media Marketing · Social networks · facebook · next gen market research

25 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Eric Bell // Aug 11, 2010 at 8:05 pm

    I was wondering what you were up to when you were posting all those question on the LinkedIn…

  • 2 jon Leiman // Aug 12, 2010 at 8:00 am

    Brilliant!

  • 3 Tom H C Anderson // Aug 12, 2010 at 8:07 am

    I tested on a few other groups as well with same results. Wanted to make sure it had nothing to do with my role as mod in NGMR, it didn’t.

    Curious Jon & Eric, as fellow moderators, what your views on this are for your communities?

    I hope those who agree with me will let Linkedin know. They are expecting a fair amount of complaints from the mods with a big UI change like this I think. So for them to revert to anything from old UI I think they will first also need to get a lot of user complaints.

  • 4 Michelle Finzel // Aug 12, 2010 at 9:04 am

    Interesting experiment, Tom. I think it’s cool that you provided the word clouds as way to give back something to the people who participated, albeit unknowingly.

  • 5 Meta Brown // Aug 12, 2010 at 12:28 pm

    Tom,

    Ick.

    Neither the new nor the old UI for LinkedIn Groups supports thoughtful discussion well. Some of my other groups have discussions with thousands of responses but no meaningful sharing of information. Forum interfaces are so much more satisfying and the quality of the discussions on the best forums is much better than any group I’ve encountered on LinkedIn.

    I regret that the simplicity of creating LinkedIn groups, twitter accounts and other modern web channels seems to promote the sharing of drivel. But not as much as I regret that the volume of drivel makes it ever harder even to locate the meaningful discussions and participate.

  • 6 Barbara // Aug 12, 2010 at 1:27 pm

    Is this feature optional on LI Groups? I’m not seeing it on every group. Wondering if there’s a minimum number of active members - which would of course, be misleading out of the gate.

  • 7 laurent // Aug 12, 2010 at 2:04 pm

    Tom
    When a system/platform is easy to game, people will game it. We see that with the acquisition of Twitter’s followers.
    Most systems are designed to select their tops based on quantitative factors vs qualitative one.
    Seems like LinkedIn attemps to pop-up a list of influencers fall in the same category.
    Identifying influencer is a critical piece of social media but it can’t be done well without taking into consideration context and time. Context to evaluate constantly if a contributor is a relevant/valuable member of the community in which influence will be calculated. Time because plenty of signals are required to evaluate influence (not just 3 questions like in your example). Failing to do so will make the system easy to game.
    Laurent

  • 8 Greg Timpany // Aug 12, 2010 at 2:17 pm

    Research as a penguin. Now that’s an interesting thought. Seriously, I appreciate both the simple comments and getting to know other folks, as well as the meaty discussions. I have found both on LinkedIn. Admittedly though, it is becoming increasingly more challenging to sort the wheat from the chaff.

  • 9 Tom H C Anderson // Aug 12, 2010 at 2:21 pm

    @Laurent

    I agree, my company works with text analytics, and so with algorithms a lot more complex than the one employed to calculate Top-Influencer. That said, no matter how complex you make the software it will never be as good as an intelligent and motivated moderator. LinkedIn had an army of us fans willing to do this for free. Now we can offer very little in terms of helping to manage and order what once was great content. I don’t understand why this should be seen as a step forward for either LinkedIn or the professionals who found the group function useful.

  • 10 Shiyun // Aug 12, 2010 at 4:29 pm

    Very good experiment, you are a real market guru!
    Although I don’t think the LI Top Influencer is just based on quantity from what I saw in other two
    super groups I belonged. To analynize the content for quality may be too complex. But if Bing can find more relevant informaton then Google, LI should be able to come up with some integellent algorithm.
    Echo Meta said, it’s become very difficult to find the meaningful discussions. And this will make it worse.

    As for the new GUI poll results, it’s perplexing. I am a very small group manager, mainly a user. Do not like the new GUI, b/c the News is mixed with Discussions. Since the poll return rate is under 1%,
    the deviation % would be very high.

  • 11 laurent // Aug 12, 2010 at 8:15 pm

    @Tom
    Possible we should talk as we seem to work in ‘connected’ space. We use also social network analysis for the holy grail of identifying influencers.
    I totally agree that technology alone can’t do it all. Someone has to double check the outcome of an algo. The human factor is key in social media.
    Laurent

  • 12 Tom H C Anderson // Aug 12, 2010 at 9:28 pm

    Sure Laurent, reach out to me on LinkedIn or via the contact info on http://www.andersonanalytics.com

    We are a full service online market research firm. Our USP though is text analytics, which has allowed us to do some very interesting work with social media…

  • 13 Andreas // Aug 13, 2010 at 3:50 pm

    Hi Tom,

    interesting experiment and good article.

    I guess it’s about finding the right balance between good and engaging contents. At LI and in general.

    Andreas

  • 14 Tom H C Anderson // Aug 13, 2010 at 4:50 pm

    Thanks, yes, but I think many of us liked it better before when it didn’t have to be both, one or the other alone can also be valuable.

  • 15 Mike Handy // Aug 13, 2010 at 7:41 pm

    I agree with you… linkedin was the one place where expert knowledge was valued and fame grabbing didn’t matter. There was always the contingent of hoping to get a job out of the post, but that meant they actually researched the topic at hand. Personally I have always felt that Linkedin provided some of the best information on the web… it really is a place for experts.

  • 16 Todd Nevins - icrunchdata // Aug 16, 2010 at 11:55 am

    Excellent tips on LinkedIn. It has revolutionized the job hunt and networking world.

  • 17 Tom H C Anderson // Aug 16, 2010 at 12:43 pm

    UPDATE:

    As of a couple of days ago, and probably because of this post, LinkedIn seems to have temporarily disabled the “Top-Influencers” widget in groups. It’s still there, just not working anymore.

    I sincerely hope that they did not take this post to mean that this widget needed to be fixed. The influencer widget was just a visible symptom of the problem with the new design. What really needs to be fixed is that in a professional group neophyte users who ask really basic questions that generate a lot of responses, get their discussions moved to the top, while other important discussions disappear forever.

    I have requested a blog interview Ian McCarthy who is Product Strategist and the lead for LinkedIn groups. I’m hoping he will accept the invitation and let us know what LinkedIn’s long term views for groups is.

    Tom

  • 18 Daryle W. Hier // Aug 18, 2010 at 1:33 pm

    The real draw for LinkedIn, as far as I was concerned, was the serious discussions and lack of drivel.

    I would hope they would stay that way and not reward spam type minutia that’s prevalent and become just another social media grab bag.

  • 19 Alice Irvan // Aug 18, 2010 at 8:57 pm

    Well, Tom, it seems the one word question has taken on a life of its own with folks still answering.

    Yes, one of the things I liked about LinkedIN was that it seemed to encourage thoughtful responses. I guess every tool evolves; these social media tools just evolve faster than other communication tools.

    Many of us will continue to seek out other thought leaders and thoughtful discussions. As for myself, as the owner of a small company, I’m in the process of fine-tuning, re-focusing, or whatever word you want to use for changing my social media strategy. I plan to continue with this group.

    Thanks to all of you for your input. Thanks, Tom, for the experiment. I sort of wondered if you’d “lost your mind” with your questions. I do appreciate your comments and the word cloud.

    Keep posting.

  • 20 Tom H C Anderson // Aug 19, 2010 at 9:12 am

    Thanks for your post Alice and for continuing to be patient with the new interface on NGMR.

    Yes, you were not the only one to wonder if I had lost my mind. Those who know me know I prefer to tackle difficult questions head on rather than a bunch of cute polite tweets.

    Will be interesting to see what happens. I will be discussing the issue with someone from LinkedIn next week, and so will probably be able to post an update based on that discussion and give us a little clarity in terms of what their views of the evolution are.

  • 21 Jakob Thusgaard // Sep 23, 2010 at 9:59 am

    As far as I can judge most of the conclusions in this post relate to the implementation of the new “Top Influencers” feature on LinkedIn.

    Personally, I think it completely fails to add any kind of value as all you can see is which discussions had many comments in the past week.
    As in “the old days” you still have to check if those comments are valuable or not.

    What might have made more sense is a “Best Answer” feature as seen on various forums including LinkedIn Answers. That would increase value as it saves time or others interested in the questions and the answer.

    Guess you can’t have it all. LinkedIn sure do have some kinks they need to sort out with Groups before they become really good.

  • 22 Erwin Timmerman // Dec 17, 2010 at 4:10 am

    Your comment is spot-on. I have asked a few newbie questions in a group I recently joined, and soon became top influencer. Sure, I think the questions I asked were intelligent :-), but the most valuable? No.

    As I didn’t know what a top influencer was and linked-in didn’t really tell me, I googled and found this article.

  • 23 Stephanie (@wildfireeffect) // Feb 25, 2011 at 2:53 pm

    Thank you, top influencer has always been a bit of a mystery to me. It had not occurred to me that the system was counting the number of people commenting. I wonder if it counts across all of linked in, as I have witnessed a new contributor take top influencer with a single post, prior to a response.

    Thank you again

  • 24 William A. Branham // Jun 26, 2011 at 10:11 am

    The value of LinkedIn groups on the other hand had been that while fewer individuals were doing the talking at any one time, more meaningful expert level knowledge was being shared.

  • 25 A Loftman // May 19, 2012 at 5:13 pm

    Maybe the title should be changed. Most prolific poster….the word influence really is not accurate at all.
    One group I belong to, the top 2 influencers (ahem) posts dozens of cut/paste snippets about anything at all. Answer any one question with dozens of irrelevant remarks…influencer…NOT

    Good suggestion (Best Answer) being the top influencer, but who would decide that. Just remove the unnecessary accolade…..simple solutions.

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