On Free Content

When I first heard LinkedIn was expanding its influencer program, I thought that it was a kind of cool move - and a step in the right direction from trying to own the conversation to democratizing it. But now I'm not so sure. Because it looks a whole lot like another company trying to get free content in exchange for free publicity, but in the case of online platforms like this one, that's not exactly an even exchange.

LinkedIn, apparently has a broad definition of what, exactly, constitutes "influence" - in the expanded program's pool of potential contributors, it's an exclusive club but not necessarily a small one in terms of volume: 25,000 is a whole lot of noise to have to filter through; we're not hard wired, scientifically speaking, to know more than 1,000 people, period, much less listen to what they have to say. If you've ever looked at a trending hashtag on Twitter or Facebook, you'll know what I mean - sure, 99% of the content is relevant, but following along or finding meaning in this kind of volume is drinking from the digital firehose.

While I'm not sure how LinkedIn determines who, in fact, is worthy of this honorific, the fact is that online influence isn't worth a whole lot. In fact, I have a relatively high Klout score (although I pretend not to care about such things) - it's about the same as some of your more visible Fortune 500 consumer brands' social presence - and for what it's worth, all I've gotten because of it is a $5 gift certificate to McDonalds. Which makes sense, because social content and amplification about as close as you can get to a McJob in the new world of knowledge workers - thoughtless, repetitive, dead end and plagued by rampant turnover.

But the influence that actually matters outside of the online world isn't so amorphous - it really comes down to dollars and cents. Every company says that customers matter the most, but that's not true at all: for the publicly traded ones like LinkedIn, business can be broken down into a continual quest to increase and return value for shareholders.

Beating the Street and growing your share price (and hence, creating tangible wealth for pretty much everyone in the C-Suite or ground floor whose compensation is primarily equity based) requires continual growth, quarter after quarter. That's not easy to do, particularly when your primary metrics, like LinkedIn, rely almost exclusively on traffic as a benchmark for overall business health.

While these valuation drivers may change as the company matures to things like customer renewals, tangible asset appreciation and other boring financial statement stuff, for right now, active users, site visitors and pure volume metrics are really the only barometer of business performance, largely because the value of the display advertising market is too dynamic to price quarterly projections after at the moment.

Add the fact that the recruitment market - this site's cash cow - has not only been tapped out due to an exorbitant price point for most employers and a general shift in sentiment that maybe this isn't the silver bullet that most thought it was back when the platform was, for all intents and purposes, a killer app that was free to use and stunningly effective. Now, not so much - in fact, the sentiment has widely soured, which has clearly sent a red flag to the brain trust by the Bay that word of mouth might not be working out so well as a long term growth strategy.

So, in the quest to keep their shareholders happy and not be AOL 2.0, LinkedIn knows that, ultimately, they need to turn to the only sure thing in the mysterious world of SEO - original content by authors with some degree of authority rank really high, particularly for sites that keep that funnel filled with fresh content and those who get backlinked to by sites with similar authority - which is why Wikipedia, for example, will inevitably return near the top of almost all search results, because its model (and non-profit TLD) are built for search engines.

LinkedIn knows that it can't grow new users forever, and so, the only way to keep traffic up is through original content that other sites will link to - particularly since most of its user base, I'd project, was grown due to the recession and its macroeconomic effects, making LinkedIn's success cyclical instead of secular.

At the time of this writing, $LNKD was trading for a whopping $210 a share, and the company was valued at over $25 billion (that's billion, with a B) dollars, which puts the average GDP of most developing nations to shame. This is a stunning success in terms of the Street, but like its job board predecessors, this success might be fleeting. Monster Worldwide (NYSE: MWW) used to be part of the bellwether S&P 500 index. Now it's more or less a penny stock.

LinkedIn has learned that while the HR technology market can be quite fickle, particularly around recruiting products, content is the one constant that will make or break a company's continued relevance and viability. Unfortunately, like so many of their once bleeding edge predecessors rendered obsolete by the fickle fortunes of consumer preference, they haven't learned you get what you pay for.

Which is nothing. While I get to "build my audience" and "expand my reach," one thing I do not get is so much as a single share of stock for sharing my stuff. Nor can I hope to monetize it, unfortunately, because publishing on this platform means I no longer own my intellectual property: LinkedIn does. And at the end of the day, I'll be lucky if that will even get me a McNugget meal - but it will probably buy Reid Hoffman another home, in aggregate. Sweat equity for real equity is a good exchange when you're on the latter end of that equation.

It saddens me that content has become such a commodity that even the biggest brands refuse to pay for it, but I'll hold out hope that maybe, just maybe, when we're done destroying the English language and replacing it with infographics and numbered lists, at least we'll still preserve our freedom of speech and freedom to exchange ideas that makes this whole internet thing so cool in the first place.

But something tells me this post is either going to be censored, suppressed or deleted from public view. That is, after it's scraped, indexed, repackaged and resold.

Here's hoping once I hit 'publish,' they prove me wrong. In the meantime, you can check out my other stuff at RecruitingDaily.com. Hey, had to get a backlink in there, too.