This month’s Online Community Expert Interview is with Allen Blue of LinkedIn. LinkedIn has traditionally been the professional network of choice, and has experienced a surge in use and attention in recent months because of the increase in job-seeking activity.Allen is one of the co-founders of LinkedIn, where he manages the Content and Communities division, covering LinkedIn’s Groups, Events, Answers, Communication and Network Updates products. He was formerly Director of Product Design at SocialNet.com, a social networking service supporting dating, recreational and professional activities, where he was responsible for product design and implementation of SocialNet’s member-data focused business model.
Q: Can you talk about the process of balancing both 1. the need sticking to your vision with 2. responding to market needs & direction?
A: When I think about Vision, I think about a statement of what we’re going to be when we grow up and take our place in the market. And it’s a promise to our customers — an implicit contract describing what we’re going to provide them, what the ground rules are for our relationship with them. We may not share the entire vision with our customers, but the spirit of that vision is part of all the products we produce. This is one of the reasons that Visions have ethical overtones.
It’s important not to confuse a Vision with a product design, or even a strategy. I think people frequently say “Vision” when they mean “the product I’m building.” The product you’re building should always be open to substantial modification and change: you either got it right, or you didn’t, but what matters is how you react and make it successful.
If a Vision is formulated correctly, then it is lofty, generally applicable to many situations, and axiomatic. Take “Access to all of the world’s information” as an example. There are many ways to get to that kind of vision — many products and strategies that will get you there. If a Vision is tied to a specific product and strategy, it’s unlikely to succeed.
And even Visions are really hypotheses at first — they are insightful observations of the market. But they should be shaped by realities in the market in the early days, and made higher, less detailed, more like magnetic north and less like a plan to get there.
Q: What excites you most about LinkedIn today?
A: I feel like with each major increment in the size of the network, the set of opportunities changes for LinkedIn. We’re now able to build businesses that we had hardly imagined four years ago.
Most exciting to me right now is how we’re going to be able to help groups of LinkedIn users work together. We’ve already had substantial success with LinkedIn Groups, and we’re concentrating a lot of effort this year building out new kinds of business communities, and new kinds of professional interaction.
The wraps are still on most of these products, and I’m afraid I can’t go into details yet.
Q: What other online community or social media company do you most admire, and why?
A: A few that come to mind are Slashdot, Ning, Yahoo Answers, Kiva.org, Twitter… But if I have to pick one, it’s Facebook.
Facebook’s great. They have virality where everybody starts viral events. They have aligned their product beautifully with real social patterns and needs — just the right features to augment and extend already-strong social activity. They provide value at a high rate: people hear more from their friends, they spend more time with people they care about, they get to express themselves. The interaction and product designs are just exceptional.
There is a huge amount to learn from Facebook about how technology lies alongside life, and how products can succeed when they do so.
