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MARKETING | Noah Brier

Putting Money Over What's Good for Your Customer

How LinkedIn and lots of other publishers are putting profits first.

December 14, 2007 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 3 COMMENTS

Not to beat a dead horse, but I'm going to talk about motivations again. In the past few weeks I've given quite a bit of thought to what motivates Google and now I'd like to talk about a few other web services and how their decisions are not necessarily in line with what's actually good for their customers.

It's not really a new story for web properties to put money or customers. Myspace has been doing it for years. Their site is so clearly optimized for pageviews over customer experience it's sickening. The number of unnecessary steps in every action is just incredible. But they're not alone, anyone who has received an eVite and been annoyed by the fact that you had to click through to find out the location/date/time will know what I'm talking about. (For those uninitiated in the ways of online advertising, the reason eVite won't send this information in an email is that they only make money on showing ads and they can't show you ads in an email -- or at least they haven't figured out how).

Anyway, when I read about how Drew had been kicked out of LinkedIn, I just had to write about it. You see, he had included the name of his company, Renegade, in the name field on his LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn doesn't like this type of behavior because many people who include extra words in their name field are actually including their email to work around LinkedIn's pay system. For instance, I might list my name as Noah Brier (nb@noahbrier.com), so that if someone wanted to get in touch with me from the site they wouldn't need to a) ask for a "LinkedIn introduction" or b) pay for LinkedIn's premium service which allows someone to send as much "InMail" as they'd like (that's code for LinkedIn user-to-user messages).

Facebook on the other hand, took the opposite approach recently by opening up their messaging. Now when you receive an email notification letting you know someone has messaged you on Facebook it actually includes the body of the message in the email (a feature which I, for one, am damn happy about). While in the short term this may cut down on visits to the site, in the long term this kind of customer-first strategy seems like the only way to go.

I'm quite interesting in how monetization needs end up driving product design in directions other than what's best for customers. Ultimately this is a byproduct of publishers addiction to online display advertising.


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COMMENTS

1Steven Kalifowitz

Do we need to mention the entire media business?

There is no more mass-market, as far as the web is concerned. Companies really do need to care about each individual customer, and each customer's specific experience. It's too easy to put the customer second, and it's just as easy for your competition to swoop in & steal your customer.

But companies and the people who run them that are slaves to the street, are doomed to die.

December 15, 2007

2David Berkowitz

The LinkedIn policing is heavy handed, but the email thing doesn't totally explain their rules. First, it doesn't apply to why Drew got kicked off (and it's not even listed in the cited violations of the name field that LinkedIn wrote him). Second, you can set your contact settings so that you're accessible to anyone on LinkedIn and they don't need to be a paying member to contact you.

One question that still remains: how come no one from LinkedIn is commenting on Drew's blog or yours? Mario, are you out there?

December 15, 2007

3Dave Epstein

I agree that many times there are extraneous steps in these sort of things, but at the same time, they are providing a free service that people enjoy. Their source of income comes from making customers happy and willing to return, yes, but at the same time they do run a business and having to click through to Evites website to see what’s going on doesn’t bother me. They would have less than 1/10 of their current page-views if they gave all the information via email. FaceBook can allow us to see messages via email because most of their page views likely come from checking other things that wouldn’t come via email. I for one don’t mind having to go to the website as long as I am not inconvenienced beyond that. I try to tell myself that I can’t complain if it’s free. Now on websites where I pay a membership and STILL get that shit…then I am angered.

December 17, 2007