Mining LinkedIn Answers and Discussions
LinkedIn Answers offers a way to ask and answer questions from other professionals on LinkedIn. Some of the top people are answering nearly 200 questions a week! This service hopes to tap the “wisdom of the professional crowd.” And quite often it hits the mark even with questions whose answer is typically, “It depends.” We know those answers require the most wisdom and professional experience to answer.
I stumbled upon two seemingly opposing questions in LinkedIn this week, as if one person needs to find the other. I was intrigued.
On The Content Wrangler Community LinkedIn group, one person asks if it’s possible to find a web content job that’s not also a programming job, or a content creation job that would offer technical training on the job. While it’s a post in the Jobs area, and not in the Answers area, it caught my eye as an interesting question. So I did a search for “web content” in LinkedIn Answers and came across another question about web content has to do with copy writing and how to find writers who can write exceptionally even in specialized niches.
The answers for the first question, where the person seems to have more content creation skills than tool skills, seem to say that a generalist’s approach is more valuable to most companies today. They list all the different tasks they’ve done in a business environment. One person even says, “good writing is neither understood nor very highly valued.”
Yet one of the answers to the question asking for niche content creators gives a quite specific method for finding good writers, namely journalists. She says “In addition to MediaBistro.com, I suggest the American Society of Journalists and Authors at ASJA.org. (Writers are vetted and national writing experience is required for membership.) … An experienced journalist can learn about a new topic and write about it in away that is both sophisticated and readable, minus the industry jargon.”
So while these questions seem related, you learn more by reading both discussions and coming to your own conclusion. I plan to do some searching in this crowd wisdom collection myself. Does anyone have good examples of LinkedIn Answers coming to the rescue for tough questions?
