They failed quite spectacularly for me:<p>"congratulations! You were one of our first 500,000 members to register in Iceland."<p>Iceland - population of 300,000.
LinkedIn are the kings of this sort of misleading information. I find it quite annoying but I suspect it is probably effective for them.<p>See also: the way they play with the "how many people have clicked on your profile in that last XYZ days" to always make it seem like you've got a lot of people clicking.
I'm routinely surprised by how religiously some of my LinkedIn connections update their profiles. For many of them, it's surely their primary social network.<p>LinkedIn is basically a contact list for me. I've always found the site cluttered and a bit clumsy, not something I want to use. Though, I do get some amusement out of seeing people predictably check my profile after meeting for the first time.<p>Things like the newish endorsement feature actually bother me. It's all very gamey, counters and "XP bars" everywhere begging your effort to make them increment.<p>I certainly understand such carrots to induce more people to make more connections, have more engagement with the site and ideally drop $240-900/yr. for premium accounts.<p>Personally, I'd be more inclined to do that if I thought connections, endorsements, profile views and whatnot were actually meaningful.<p>As it is, the only thing that seems to demonstrate any real effort/connection are recommendations which are given no more priority in the activity feed than endorsements and appear towards the bottom of profiles.
This is Genius because Linkedin has been working really hard on one feature that could possibly make a lot of users upgrade.<p>The fact that we always want to know who "peaked" at our profiles (I'm sure half of your secretly wanted to know at some point of your life who looked at your facebook profile right?) leads people to upgrade.<p>A funny thing happened to me a few months ago, I was browsing linkedin and landed on a old client's profile and I was wondering what was going on with him and his projects.<p>A few hours later I got an email from him saying that he got a notification that I was viewing his profile and that made him wondered what is going on with me (and our company). That interaction made me think that this single feature is genius, it helps reconnect with people (some will argue that it might be creepy).
I feel suddenly so left out. :)<p>I actually do my best to minimize my appearance in search. No job descriptions besides titles, no skills, no visible endorsements, no recommendations. I basically use LinkedIn to keep track of ex-colleagues, but that does not stop recruiters from still finding and contacting me.
Smart marketing move. LinkedIn just made 10 million people wonder, if they are in the top 5% of most viewed profiles, who exactly did view their profile? Curious to see how many users end up converting to Pro from this "spam".
Apparently, their marketing efforts try very hard to make everyone feel special: I've just received an email exactly like the one mentioned in the blog, congratulating me: "You were one of our first million members in Hong Kong."
I don't even use LinkedIn, that's just a dummy account with no information.<p>I can imagine their marketing department trying very hard to make sure they find some kind of positively-sounding (but ultimately not very interesting) stat about every single account so they can justify sending that email to everyone.
> Then I realized top 5% isn’t really that significant.<p>It's 1 out of 20. Is that significant or not? Depends on your perspective. But it certainly is not objectively insignificant.<p>> And I noticed from their letter that LinkedIn has 200M members. 5% of 200M is 10M.<p>And if there were 1B linkedin users, it would be even more. But 5% is still 1 out of 20. Again, if you find that impressive or not is up to you, but it is a very clear, nonmisrepresented percentage.
I got this email (as did millions of others) but the real surprise is that it doesn't mean much to make that by actual profile views. Thinking back I don't remember a month where I had more than maybe 100 people view my profile, average month was probably around 50-60. If you think about it, most people get that probably weekly on facebook and daily on twitter.
Reminds me of the old Point "Top 5% of all web sites" award graphic that seemingly every website boasted in 1995. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycos_TOP_5%25" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycos_TOP_5%25</a>
I'm in the top 1%, can I feel special ;)<p>P.S. Looks like at least two versions were sent out, one with 5% and another with 1% that I got. Were there other?<p>From a marketing standpoint it worked, since now people are talking about it.
OKCupid does something similar with attractiveness: they email you to congratulate you if you're one of the top 50%. Based on all my friends who have bragged, it works. I always thought that was a great way to flatter people into using the site.
<i>"The analytics team didn’t do a bad job crunching all that pageview data either."</i><p>I do not do a lot of analytics (ie close to nil). Is it really that hard to have a counter for the number of visits to each person's profile?
That looks straight out of the "commemorating another 5 years" token drawer of the BigCorps I worked for. Um, gag?<p>Talk about a skeumorphism better left behind...