SEO, LinkedIn and The Real You

 

LinkedIn "Long Tail" Skills Index for Martin Smith

How LI Is Crowdsourcing YOU

When my friend Melinda Thielbar explained what Reid Hoffman's brilliant LinkedIn team was really doing with their calls for "endorsements I was stunned. Stunned by the sheer genius of such a simple example of crowdsourced gamification, amazing and LinkdeIn's gambit keeps getter better.

Melinda took a moment out of my interview with her husband Richard Dansky to explain that LinkedIn was crowdsourcing data cleanup. When we endorse each other we, our crowd of "friends", cleans and tags LinkedIn's most important data - US :).

Marty's LinkedIn Profile 

Look at the location of Skills and Expertise on the public profile, this is the area we are cleaning with endorsements. Now think about the sheer GENIUS of asking a crowd of friends to "clean" this data. Accuracy will be HIGH even as spoofing is, thanks to the math of a skills power distribution (all your friends voting), impossible.

LI Endorsements Area Is Genius because:

* New skills are easy to add because WE add them.
* Imagine the universe of LI data, now that is BIG powerful data.
* LinkedIn will know their 80/20 split - their real traffic influencers.
* LinkedIn will know who to ask for help in...well anything.
* Cleaning costs are low thanks to crowdsourcing and gamification.
* LinkedIn creating interesting conversation with us too -
* How does who we think we ARE match to the US our friends know?

Think vs. Are

I am NOT one of those people who, after taking the Meyers-Briggs personality profile, walked around surprised at the Martin who emerged from the test, but I am surprised by the "Martin" emerging from my friend's crowdsourcing.

The web's reach is an amazing thing. There are people who know me pretty well I've never met. I guess that idea is old hat, but there are people who see new dimensions to me who I've never met. Such perspective is very cool and helpful.

When a friend adds "mentoring" to my profile it warms my heart. When someone I don't know adds "lead generation" it makes my day (lol). I see myself as an artistic storyteller, but my crowd of friends, readers and friends of friends see me as "social media engineer".

Artist isn't on my tag list and "storyteller" is way down there. I see my father's engineer influence more than my mother's free spirited southern Gothic something out of Flannery O'Connor influence. Analytics and Key Performance Indicators are "engineering" no matter how creative I may be approaching them.

Listening carefully I understand.

My stories rarely wander far. I started sharing biographical stories such as the day my drug dealer friend Julio almost got me killed (in college when one has "drug dealer" friends lol). Then, being an Internet marketer, I watched Key Performance Indicators. Biography didn't play. Biography received few shares and fewer comments. Biography, at least on ScentTrail Marketing, felt like talking about myself to myself so it didn't make the cut (still some of my favorite stories :).

My stories aren't as myth laden and heroic focused as I would like or they need to be. My ScentTrail Marketing and Atlantic BT stories tend to wander with purpose like an big Easter egg hunt. I have work to do, new skills to learn and some old skills to balance with new.

I'm headed to Robert McKee's Story seminar in NYC in April. Spending a few days with a storytelling master will help. I may never approach my grandfather's ability to stop time with a yarn or find the humor in life's every moment like my mother, but I'm betting we can sooth the engineer and add a yarn or too even as we discuss the latest in Internet marketing.

Art is from the amazing Sunni Brown. She attended McKee's Story seminar a few months ago.
Read about Sunni's experience at Story.