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In the back door, behind the scenes, the without fanfare product launch-style that Linkedin does so well, you will see that they have added a new section at the bottom of your profile called “Personal”.
After years of railing against the gods and their own member base, admonishing them to not post their contact information on profiles , Linkedin is actually encouraging people to include their birthday, marital status, residential or business address, and phone numbers on their profile.
Of course this is all optional but still what a sea change in attitude and corporate strategy. If contact information this brings into question how they plan to monetize the site. Of course few will have access to anywhere near 40,000,000 profiles but you can through your first degree contacts have them look and retrieve the contact information for you. But is all seems way to laborious to make it worthwhile. Maybe Linkedin finally figured that out. Further is was easy to just take someone's name on Linkedin and track them down through Google or Zoominfo so they might as well keep people on the site.
But this begs the bigger question. Since its inception, and I know this first hand as I argued with the then executive team against it, Linkedin as aimed to be a tool not a social network.. Since people are naturally prone to form community, the social networks formed on the outside of Linkedin in Yahoogroups run by people like Vincent Wright. In the past year Linkedin has opened up Groups with a directory and discussion, added applications that expand profiles, and now has included Personal Information.
All of these additions bring a breath of badly needed fresh air to what still is the absolute best place to build a professional brand. Stay tuned for what's next.
