LinkedIn email Blasts and The Danger and Opportunity of Using Cool Features in Unintended Ways
A few days ago I received an email from a friend announcing his new job as CTO of a startup company . Except the email didn’t come from my friend. It came from LinkedIn, via a feature that allows LinkedIn users to announce new jobs. Very cool, and very useful. I thought that sending an email announcing the availability of my new book on Innovation Games to my (admittedly small) LinkedIn network would be of interest to my network. So I logged into LinkedIn looking for a way to do this. In the process, I found a great example of how using existing features in unintended ways can both spur creative thinking and run afoul of license agreements. The result provides a lot of food for thought. Perhaps more importantly, the professional manner in which the LinkedIn team handled the situation provides a great example of how to manage potentially volatile situations.
The Goal: Sending a Message to My LinkedIn Network
The first thing I tried was the “Send message:” list of options from the home page (see below). Yeah, I know – this was the completely obvious choice, but let’s give credit to the LinkedIn making it the completely obvious choice.
I must admit that when I first looked at this list I was disappointed, because I didn’t see an obvious way to send an email to my network. Since I’m a freeloader at LinkedIn (aka, “Personal Account”), I started to think that perhaps this was an option reserved for paying customers. This is fair enough, and is certainly a feature that a user might be willing to pay for.
My mind started to wander. I really wanted to send an email to my network, but I imagined that LinkedIn would probably want me to sign up for a monthly fee for something that I wanted to do just once. Time to do a little research. As it turns out, LinkedIn does offer this feature in their various subscription oriented account plans (“Business”, “Business plus”, and “Pro”). The problem is that I don’t write books every month, and I don’t have a lot of reasons to blast emails to my LinkedIn network. As a result, signing up for a monthly fee for a service I’ll use once infrequently didn’t seem like a good choice.
Ideally, what I’d like LinkedIn to provide is a transactional business model for distributing emails (more information on business models can be found in my book Beyond Software Architecture, which I should probably discuss in a future post).
Creative Thinking About a Feature
Back to the drawing board.
My friend had used LinkedIn to send a job notification. This capability appeared to exist for free. What if I were to treat my announcement on the Innovation Games book like a job notification? Innovation Games are, after all, a job that myself and other Innovation Game Certified Facilitators love to do. So what if instead of announcing my book, I was really making an announcement of a new job – Innovation Games.
I selected the menu item “Send job notification” and filled out a form capturing all of the relevant details. It was, again, quite easy to use. I clicked “Send” and voila! A message sent to my LinkedIn network. 
The first reply to this email came from Scott Gilbert, President of Enthiosys, who noted that I was misusing a feature. Creatively misusing a feature, but, misusing a feature. He was right, of course, but I thought it was a fun way to get the word out about the book to a network that I thought would want to hear about the same. I didn’t even stop to think that I might have been violating a license agreement. I should have.
SPAM: It is all a Matter of Perception
A few days later I found the following message in my email inbox:
Dear Luke,
We have received complaints that you have used LinkedIn’s job forwarding feature to promote your new book and ask your connections to send the promotion to your connections. Your book looks genuinely interesting. However, I’m sure you’re aware that this is a really blatant misuse of LinkedIn. What you may not understand is how much this actually hurts everyone on LinkedIn by spreading the idea that LinkedIn is a source of spam. That encourages other aggressive marketers to try to imitate this type of misuse of LInkedIn, and it encourages people who end up getting unwelcome spam through LinkedIn to avoid using LinkedIn.
Please read our User Agreement, especially the User Conduct section and let me know if you understand and agree to follow our policies. Until we hear from you we’ve restricted your ability to send messages of any kind through LinkedIn.
Nothing personal here. I hope you understand that we’re trying to keep LinkedIn useful, safe, and non-annoying for everyone.
All the best, and good luck with your book.
Duncan Work
LinkedIn Privacy Officer
I immediately replied with an apology, and Duncan removed the restriction from my account.
It is worthy to examine Duncan’s email in greater detail. It is a superbly professional way of telling me that I had violated my User Agreement. Duncan’s tone is straightforward. It doesn’t make me feel like an idiot or cheater, and it clearly explains why this policy is important to me and everyone using LinkedIn. It opens the door to future conversations, and outlines how to remove my account restrictions.
More importantly, I feel that a person read this email and acted on the situation in a way that was guided by corporate policies and yet tailored to this specific situation. I suspect, but cannot prove, that if I was a known spammer, or if this email was part of a consistent pattern of abuse, that this response would have been markedly different. The unintended effect is that I have an even more positive image of LinkedIn – there are real people there!
I’d like to point out that I’ve tried to manage my LinkedIn network pretty carefully and was therefore genuinely surprised that any member of my network would not be extremely happy to receive this email. Most know I’ve been working on the Innovation Games book for several years, and Innovation Games help you better understand your customers. That said, I must concede that it meets the definition of Spam, and whomever reported to the LinkedIn team certainly had every right to do this.
I’ve learned since then that people are forwarding the message to their LinkedIn network, possibly using the same approach. While I’m happy that the book is being promoted, I certainly don’t want to promote the misuse of LinkedIn features or the proliferation of Spam.
Creative Thinking About a Feature
Recall that this post was motivated by thinking of the Innovation Games book announcement as a new job that I was announcing to my LinkedIn network. More generally, it has me thinking about the power that unintended features have to spur creative thinking and how product teams can capitalize on the same. Right now, I’m wondering what would happen if I were to anthropomorphize Innovation Games and think of them as a person looking for work. What would their resume say? It would probably describe the games, list relevant experience, explain what they’re great at (improving customer understanding) — all of the “normal” things that you put into a resume. Someone reading this resume would then know if they want to “hire” the games to help them better understand their customers. (Hmmm. More creative thinking. That sounds like a data sheet. Maybe resumes are a better format for describing products than data sheets).
What would happen should I post this resume a major job web site? Would I run the risk of unintentionally violating another license agreement? Possibly. And since ignorance of the law is no excuse, I’d be more sensitive to using such resume posting features properly (or at least be more aware of intentionally breaking them ;-).
I am also thinking about how patterns of misuse can be captured and used to promote your products and services. Enthiosys has one client that offers a SaaS solution that has honed their analysis of user behavior to the point where they can identify patterns of misuse in their product and proactively recommend consulting services to resolve problems experienced by the company. These are weighted by the amount of revenue provided by the customer, so that intervention can occur quickly where it makes the most sense. In this example of using LinkedIn, I would have been pleased had Duncan included either of the following in his email:
- a link to other service plans that might allow me to accomplish the email goal, or,
- a clear statement that there is simply no way to send out this kind of email via LinkedIn.
As I described earlier, another option would be for LinkedIn to offer some of their features via a transactional business model. They’d have to explore this idea very carefully, because I suspect that their financial plans are based on subscribers per month, not individual transactions. As with any business model choice, the trick is matching the value provided to the way that you charge for that value. Keep Media, another Enthiosys client, has found a way to offer both transactional and subscription choices to their core service model with interesting results.
Managing Features For Fun and Profit
One way to think about what product managers do is that they manage features for fun and profit. People like me will use them ways that range from conventional to novel, and in ways that may or may not be compliant with existing license agreements. How do you respond to your users when they creatively use your features? How do you respond when creative use of a feature crosses over the line and becomes a violation of a license agreement? Do either they feed your product innovation engine? If so, how?
August 24th, 2006 at 2:58
Social software is a real adventure. The final end user experience is so heavily shaped by how people adopt your tools, and the controls of the developer are quite indirect and have lag time. However, I think the natural social feedback loops will usually kick in quickly since no action is taken in a vacuum. It did not take long for someone I personally know to complain to me about the misuse you describe . . . I appreciate you taking not just a selfish perspective, but a system view, which is, of course, what we need to do since with seven million members, there are many conflicting desires, behaviors and responses, and it’s a real challenge to find the right balance for LinkedIn to work well for most members most of the time.
-Konstantin
August 24th, 2006 at 3:37
The other option would’ve been to export all your LinkedIn contacts and do a BCC in your e-mail client - this would’ve avoided the “spam” accusation, I suspect, though the generic nature of the message might’ve given it away.
August 24th, 2006 at 7:45
Luke,
solid post. a couple of thoughts-
1. We saw the founder of LinkedIn speak in Palo Alto on Thursday at the Churchill startup panel. I was extremely impressed with his philosophy. I also had a mixup occur a few months ago where they essentially merged my account with a freind’s account. Their service dept was very accomodating (we were free loaders as well at the time) and they took the time to make things right and upgraded our accounts to pro to compensate for the mixup- top notch.
2. i like your idea of personifying the games. it’s consistent with Clayton Christiensen’s notion of situational-based assessment vs. attribute-based assessment in the Innovator’s Solution and his recommendation of “hiring” products for a specific “job.” I bet you would meet resistance if you tried posting them under a job site but it’s an interesting idea. It reminds me of a movie i saw not long ago called “The Corporation” where the premise is “If companies are entities that have the same rights as people, what would they be like AS PEOPLE.” They ended up matching a traditional corporation almost exactly to the DSM IV criteria for a psychopath - personifying an entity seems to unlock unique insights that simply aren’t there otherwise.
3. as far as your question- “how do you respond when customers creatively violate the use license?” - recall that Friendster had a huge lead on MySpace and the phenomenon of people that began creating “fakester” profiles for their pets. Dog and cat profiles outpaced people on Friendster at one point - their response: remove the animal profiles. Instead if they had srolled with it they could have capitalized on this phenomenon and been the MySpace for animals. Instead they pissed everyone off by deleting profiles and pointing to the usage license that nobody reads, left a void for Dogster to emerge and allowed MySpace to beat them in the social networking arena. I would say as long as the creative use doesn’t damage the service, companies should encourage this type of innovation around their service. It only stands to entrench them further. Forward-thinking companies (Amazon, 37signals, google, yahoo) expose an API to their services specifically to encourage others to mash their stuff and integrate with other technologies in ways they would have never fathomed. And when you can embed your offering in that way, you win.
Sean
August 24th, 2006 at 15:37
Luke, thanks so much for starting this conversation. It’s valuable on many different levels - and as you point out, not just about LinkedIn where I admit to having difficulties jumping through the hoops in order to contact people. My business is unlike many traditionally employed people who use LinkedIn and it’s a challenge to use it well and wisely - yet I feel as if it’s a valuable resource. Looks like there are more innovative approaches and creative thinking in both our futures - and hopefully at LinkedIn.
August 24th, 2006 at 18:55
Hi Luke,
You raise some really interesting questions here. And thanks for also presenting a fair account of the situation and clearly understanding LinkedIn’s position. I’m also relieved to know that I actually come across as a real person. : )
The idea of sending messages to your trusted personal network and having them send the message to their trusted network, and getting virally propagated to, potentially, thousands and thousands of people – is really intriguing and powerful.
This is a wonderful and powerful idea, but very difficult to pull off without increasing the amount of spam on the system (“spam” meaning unsolicited promotional messages that other people negatively categorize as spam).
We have some solutions in mind that can potentially make this work in the future, but for the time being we can only support limited types of these messages, such as when sending out a job notice (for a real job) or an update to your profile.
The profile update feature would have actually been OK for letting people you’re connected to know that you’re now the author of a new book. But it would not be OK to send out a “profile update” where the message, btw, also asks for donations to a cause or tries to sell a new product or service — especially when sent by people who (unlike you) have hundreds or more connections to people they don’t know well. We actually do have a few people who try that, but fortunately enough people complain so that we can limit the damage. In addition, people break connections with others who send them messages they consider to be spam. So there are some self-healing systems at work here.
And re your other points, yes! we do learn a lot from creative uses of our features by our more innovative users. If you or others have additional creative urges for using LinkedIn in novel ways, we welcome all your ideas. When we get new ideas, sometimes we might let you know why we think a particular use might not go over well with other users, or how the use might be better met some other way, or we might ask you to hang on for a while longer till we’re able to add some new functionality.
All the best,
Duncan
———————————————————–
Duncan Work
Chief Privacy & Social Responsibility Officer
LinkedIn Corporation
———————————————————–
August 27th, 2006 at 18:08
Luke,
I wrote the Active Networkers Guide at http://MyLinkWiki.com/ActiveNetworkers to provide information and support to people sending out mass email to their LinkedIn connections like you.
I hope you found it useful. I see that we have several connections in common and do invite you to connect with me for mutual referrals and updates.
Best NetWORKing,
Marc Freedman
http://MyLinkDaddy.com
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Thanks for sharing this, really helped me out.
So, how about using the export contacts function, and then importing that into a third party mailing list that you operate?
This would of course be YOUR action, not LinkedIn and you could also make it explicit you are doing so to the list members.
Just an idea.
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