From LinkedInTalks

Activity = success?

By KonstantinGuericke

LinkedIn doesn't provide any visible community activities (e.g. forums), so

some people mistakenly think sometimes that there is not significant

activity. And Alexa rankings have been used to support the view that there

is little activity on LinkedIn

(http://summation.typepad.com/summation/2003/12/how_are_social_.html).

However, the problem was that virtual all of our traffic was under https.

Now that more of our page views are under http, LinkedIn has quickly risen

to the top 200 sites (#152 as of today). According to Alexa, we now serve

more unique visitors per month than the Wall Street Journal and Forbes:

http://www.alexaholic.com/linkedin.com+forbes.com+wsj.com+webex.com+salesfor

ce.com

But activity is not our goal, and I think for most of our members success is

more important than activity. And when we deliver success/business value, we

have learned that members are happy to pay $2,000 per year for a pro

account. Our average is $200-300 per subscriber per year. We're much more

like Salesforce.com or WebEx - our goal is to let our users quickly

accomplish something and then get on with their business day.

I would say a typical professional values the fact that they don't have to

spend a lot of time on LinkedIn to get business done. For example,

recruiters and i-bankers are big users of LinkedIn. A exec recruiter may run

five searches on LinkedIn and discover 12 candidates that look like a good

fit. Eight of them respond positively, four get through the phone screen,

one gets hired and the recruiter collects $30,000 from his client. He may

have just spent 15 minutes on LinkedIn and thus not contributed a lot of

page views. But he probably loved about this was that LinkedIn didn't take a

lot of his time.

Same for a portfolio manager who runs a few searches to locate an exec who

recently left the company she is looking to invest in. Before LinkedIn, she

would have had to spend hour calling around among her Harvard Business

School section mates trying to find out who knows someone at that company.

And for highly compensated professionals, time is money.

So, our focus is on success-and the less activity required, the better.