Jumping The Gun - LinkedIn Answers

I must admit, I jumped the gun a little on the new LinkedIn Answers feature. Sometimes I just get too excited when I see the potential of something. I previously posted on the usefulness of LinkedIN’s version of professional oriented Q and A, when I should have talked about the possible potential.

The main issue of LinkedIN Answers is the quality of questions. These are actual questions I just pulled from the first two pages:

“Who needs leads?”
“Any Mark Cubans on LinkedIN?”
“Do you anticipate failure?”
“Who has tables and chairs for sale?”

Do you find any of those questions valuable, inspiring, or engaging? I certainly don’t. While I’ve seen blog posts calling for a complicated karma reputation system, I think this could easily be solved with a thumbs up/thumbs down Digg like model. Questions that fall below a certain threshold are hidden or deleted.

The other major problem is relevancy of the questions. In my opinion this is mostly due to the rigid categorical structure LinkedIn has implemented. I have found 7 or 8 questions on social networking and social media, but they were spread out among 5 different categories. The only reason I found them was because I stumbled across them while checking out the service. I can only wonder how many other questions that I might be able to engage in are out there, but I’m just not finding them because they were forced into a category that doesn’t fit.

Why not add tags to the questions? In my scenario the tag “social networking” would have been added to the question and I could have found the questions easily. They could even implement a tag RSS feed that let me know when a new question with one of my interest tags popped up.

I still hold my belief that LinkedIn Answers can be a valuable tool/resource, but they need to add some features before I return.

[tags]Social Networking, Social Network, Social Media, Online Community, LinkedIN, LinkedIN Answers, Brian Balfour[/tags]