Welcome to episode 180, it’s been a busy week for me, I nearly didn’t get time to put this episode together but I’m glad I managed to because I want to talk about the revolution that is happening before out very eyes. Stay tuned for more about that but first…… Clipper Race Update They won!! Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week LinkedIn Engineering Blog - Serving Top Comments in Professional Social Networks Interesting article, although a bit technical! Quote ‘we’ve built a scalable comment ranking system that uses machine learning (ML) to provide a personalized conversational experience to each member visiting the LinkedIn content ecosystem.’ Previously LinkedIn had a very basic way of ordering the comments in a thread; ‘The default mode for ranking comments on the feed was rank by recency: if you were the last person to post a comment on a popular thread, your comment would show up first. We had no understanding of the comment’s content, no notion of personalization, and no knowledge of the engagement that these comments were drawing.’ Comments are now assessed via machine learning where factors such as; Actual comment content Level of engagement (likes and further comments) Who posted the comment It would appear that you only see a comment from one of your connections on a thread that is already attracting plenty of engagement. This shows the importance of getting quick traction to any post…once you get early engagement then the algorithm will share subsequent comments to more of each commenters connections (interestingly they use the term connections and not followers). Comments, Likes and Shares are up by more than 60% in 2017 - wow! The machine-learned model below shows what affects what you see with regards to comments This tells us that to gain greater visibility on LinkedIn we need to think about; How many followers we have Connection strength How many profile views we get Poor performing posts can have a detrimental effect on the visibility of future comments and posts @mentions and #hashtags in comments can increase visibility Overall, whilst a bit ‘techie’ this is a valuable insight into how LinkedIn programme their algorithm. Adding LinkedIn’s Profile Card on Office 365 Offers a Simple Way to Build a Professional Relationship This seems pretty similar to the ‘Rapportive’ Gmail plugin and the Sales Navigator Gmail plugin although from the screenshots, it does appear to provide a little more information. With the amount of people who use Microsoft Office 365 this doers highlight just how important your LinkedIn profile is to you! The State of Groups Many groups have been left to fester by their owners as can be seen by these shocking numbers of ‘pending members’ in some of the groups I am in on LinkedIn. Not all groups are this bad and some are still well, run and valuable but the engagement on LinkedIn is now all in the stream and not in groups. Let’s Not Get Too Honest! Have you seen the trending #hashtag on LinkedIn #letsgethonest? LinkedIn have even feature it in this new feature as seen below; This involves posting something honest and vulnerable about yourself and nominating others to do the same. Here are some of the things people have been posting about Speech impediments Sick relatives Relatives passing away I’m homeless And the list goes on…. If you click on the image above you can read more. I’m typically enjoy genuine, authentic posts and I’ve always been a fan of showing vulnerability but this feels like a step too far for LinkedIn. Maybe I’m wrong but this feels too self-indulgent to me and I find myself wondering about people who feel the need to share such deep personal issues with the whole world in this way. As I’m about to explain in the next section, the engagement on LinkedIn is phenomenal these days and maybe this is part of what comes with that but at the end of the day, this is still a professional network and there are boundaries. Posting about feeling vulnerable in the workplace becau