Daily Archives: May 27, 2008

The Twilightfairy has more details:

we were planning the “Social media & Blog camp” to be held at Indiatimes, Gurgaon on 7th June’08. It started as an idea from scratch and finally we have managed to get a sponsored venue for this exciting event. Indiatimes, our gracious sponsor is also providing us free wi-fi, lunch, tea/coffee and snacks. There is so much to learn on Social media & blogging in the social marketing context. Are you going to be there? You can register as a speaker or just as an attendee.

This is a one-day semi-camp style “unconference”* which brings together stakeholders and audiences of social media and blogging.

Linkedin was the original “business networking” site. It soon had a legion of fans. The names that come to mind are Scott Allen and Vincent Wright. Scott had the super useful Linkedintelligence blog and Vincent set up umpteen email groups to evangelise Linkedin. Linkedin’s then VP of Marketing, Konstantin Guericke was a constant presence on the group, and kept the group in the loop about what was brewing in the works for Linkedin. Konstantin then left to start up Jaxtr and Linkedin started its own blog and things slowly went downhill from there.

Check this message that Vincent posted today on the MyLinkingPowerForum and this bit on Scott’s blog:

LinkedIn has become simply impossible to deal with as someone trying to evangelize their platform. I could give my own personal dirty laundry list a mile long, but I won’t — what they do to other people is more than enough. When I see how LinkedIn continues to ignore and/or mistreat some of its strongest evangelists and power users and refuses to address issues that have been going on for years, I simply no longer want to have my personal brand tied to their brand (that’s OK – they probably feel the same way, strangely enough).

I think LinkedIn is a great tool, and I will continue to use it, advocate it to my business associates, and train clients on using it effectively, but I’m just not going to waste any more of my time promoting it when they are not just unsupportive, but downright hostile to those of us who try to do so.

And that’s a shame! There are tonnes of organizations who would give up an arm and a leg to get customer evangelists like Scott and Vincent, and Linkedin is saying by its actions that it does not need them!

Linkedin clearly does not “get social media”. Ironically, for an organization that wants to make people connect.