For the past 30 days, I have been subscribing to the “Marketing and Sales” RSS feed from LinkedIn’s Answers section. Until the end of February I had been a casual visitor, occasionally dipping in and out to see what’s been discussed. Then I decided to add the RSS feed to Google Reader hoping to first, get a better understanding of the nature of the discussions and the contributors and second, to assess the relevance of this whole affair to Skyron and to our clients.

30 days and 1,140 RSS updates later I am unsubscribing for five reasons:

• Too much repetition: I can’t take any more questions like “How do I use LinkedIn?”
• Little insight: More often than not, Answers is used by lazy people who can’t be asked to make a simple Google search to find the information they need
• Little relevance: There are plenty of new business opportunities but the majority would benefit consultants, freelancers and small suppliers of marketing services, none of which is directly relevant to Skyron or the majority of our clients
• Tsunami of posts: The relentless posting suffocated my other feeds, resulting in me reading only a fraction of my daily intake
• Groups are better: Group discussions are more focused and the participants behave more like a community, creating more valuable content

I actually did manage to introduce a London agency I know well to an American company looking for specialists of a certain kind, but this pretty much sums up all the excitement for the month.

If you are a marketing, or comms director at a large B2B organisation you are better off joining a relevant LinkedIn Group (or setting one up!) than shooting blind in LinkedIn Answers.

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