By Janinne Brunyee
Participants on the Digital Innovators’ Tour got to experience the brand new LinkedIn building in SOMA which is the startup mecca in downtown San Francisco. In spite of having moved in only four weeks ago, our LinkedIn host, Jessica Chan, who is responsible for business and strategy, seemed right at home in the bright and creative space.
In addition to a mini tour of the building, participants also got a tour of LinkedIn’s evolving content strategy. According to Chan, the key goal is to provide content on LinkedIn that helps make them more effective at the job they are in today.
“Early on, we started working with a wide range of publishers spanning a range of topics and tried to get their content into our ecosystem. The challenge was how to surface this content to our members,” she said.
The team then started looking at how they could segment the content into categories that they could encourage members to follow. For example, TechChrunch content was channeled into a technology channel.
According to Chan, this was not a scalable way of surfacing content which led to the birth of LinkedIn’s “relevance teams’ – groups of engineers who parse through the content and surface it to members.
“For this to be effective, we need members to tell us what industry they are in, what content they are interested in etc.,” she said. “That ties into the broader aspect of identity on LinkedIn and why we encourage members to fill out their profile in its entirety.”
But this was still not the complete solution to the problem of effectively surfacing content to users. “The major disconnect historically was that the content team worked separately from LinkedIn’s flagship team who was distributing content. This also created challenges for publishing partners,” she said.
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