How Pulse Needs a Major Patch

Yes, but not smart enough!

There is a new breed of LinkedIn user, the content article writer and content networker. They like me, engage the community by posting articles and commenting on the articles of others.  We are the content builders, a most important new kind of user in your system.

A Question of Quality Content

We add value to LinkedIn every day, for free. But the system as it is, is corrupt and far too simplistic. Getting featured is like a game that promotes a formula that results in content that isn't innovative, you know just the kind of article I'm talking about!

Pulse Navigation 

Just navigating to Pulse from my LinkedIn home interface I have to go to Interests, Pulse, click on the Pulse Icon, Discover more, & scroll down. Is this an optimal customer experience of clicks just to get to the part of the site I really care about? Once I'm there, I can't even see statistics on the best authors of each channel. I have to scroll down the page due to all these 'influencers' I never said I cared about just to reach the channels. This is a problem for me. 

Here are my suggestions to the LinkedIn Pulse management team and some ideas that I'd like feedback on from other LinkedIn pulse engagers. 

How to Improve Pulse

Create a more level playing field. Don't create a hierarchy of elitism, just because you think it will make pulse more popular or drive some profit scheme.

• Don't automatically 'feature' pop-Influencers (in the spirit of content equality). This is very dumb, demeaning and clearly a publicity sham, my apologies for the blunt language. What is the incentive for a content builder to share, if they only get 100 views from their connections (assuming they are not featured)?

Give users added insights into becoming an influencer that motivate them to keep writing. 

• Create a 4th Premium type account (since obviously you want this to be profitable). This will be for the content writer professional. It will included a lot of advanced statistics, metrics and insights. You may wish to offer these stats for free to all users for a limited period of time. 

• Have rankings (gamification levels) on everything to do with articles.This is the key point of my suggestion. 

Give more statistical depth. In age of analytics, it's a bit insulting this would be so superficial. We are some of the brightest minds and you give us a 'like' button. More on the "like" button later. What else can you offer us? Wordpress for instance, offers free blogs a ton of analytics for free. 

Rankings Implementation

Rankings All-time List (searchable & with segmentation)  

1 - Rankings by all users, country & channel - lifetime activity:

# of articles posted

# of views

# of comments

# of times featured

# of unique user comments

# VLR "view to like ratio" (like div. views), per article & all-time.

# Engagement Rate (comments div. views), per article & all-time.

# Attention Rate (followers div. views), per article & all-time.

# Monitor reading time (amount of seconds a viewer actually spend on the article), this is a real metric of engagement.

#tags (top tags used in articles)

#country

#city  

#of connections

 [totally searchable]

So then if I wanted I could locate the author in California who writes about social media who has the highest engagement rate. To say this would be extremely helpful to improving how we use content on pulse is used and assimilated, would be an understatement!

P.S. You can take the fake pop-influencers off of these stats, we don't actually care about them. 

Tags Summary of Author

2 - Ability to see breakdown of all articles by (3 tags) so as to see in what domains a pulse author is mostly active.

Top Articles View by Author

3 - Ability to see an author's articles ranked by most views, comments, times featured, unique user comments, VLR, engagement or attention rate.

Channel stats

4 - Ability to see top authors on each Channel and ability to see top authors by each channel by country. 

Segment Engagement Insights

5 - For a given article, show insights about which segment of your connections engaged with the article, e.g. by industry, type of professional, etc..

An implementation of rankings and more clever insights on content statistics would warrant a premium fee for the most engaged content builders. This is because it's more akin to online education and plays upon gamification principles to drive content innovation and creativity. I have no idea why this hasn't already been implemented.  

Pulse has to differentiate itself from other content and blogging platforms and deepen the experience. As the novelty of the feature wears off, and the extreme corruption (boosted American pop-influencers) sends a lot of content builders packing, you will have to do something a lit bit more innovative to keep this working. 

#BeCreative is part of this month's publishing series where professionals explain how to harness creativity in times turmoil and growth.

 What follows are additional ideas from myself, comments, others:

• Consider offering some syndication to amateur content creators (non-influencers)

Better content filtering such as: 

• An easy way to bookmark articles for later viewing and reading (Deb)
• Article searching by (keyword) tag, over last 3 days. (Deb)
• Advanced preferences where we could veto what kind of (keywords) we don't want to see (e.g. "leadership). (Deb)
• Easier ways to personalize your content feed not only per channel, but per segment (keywords) of channels you are most interested in reading. (Deb)

Better editing features such as: 

• Editing or deletion of comments - being able to edit your own comments or delete them is fairly significant. (Kurt)
• Allow for a code format type. LinkedIn has a fairly sizeable number of programmers and architects among its readership, and being able to post code snippets (such as Gists), would be quite helpful, but even a monotext "code" font would be useful. (Kurt)
• Inline links and images within comments (Kurt)
• Permanent URLs for articles. (Kurt)

Gamification & Misc. Ideas: 

• Personal records (which of my articles received the most views, most likes, most comments and on what date)
• Collaborative editing (Google docs style)
• Be able to see views by country (world heat-map)
• Article posting in-build scheduler (being able to program and customize positing frequency, or while you are on vacation). 
• A feature where you can view other content builders who are "most like you" (in terms of industry field, article topic, and in LinkedIn usage)
• Similar to Steam, have time-tracking on how much time you've spent on different areas of LinkedIn. (article editing, reading articles of others, reading updates of connections, advanced search, Networking growing in 'People you may know', etc.)
• Allow me to see who are the top content creators in my connections, effortlessly and what topics they usually write about (tags)
• Ability to see "Top Posts" by every article tag searchable by date. 

Unique Liking Point, Voting System 

What makes a "like" valuable? Well it isn't, it's just the recognition that maybe somebody read your post, likely skimmed it and acknowledge your effort to create it. It isn't very telling. The public I can assure you, is sick of clicking on something that isn't very intelligent. 

Instead of just likes have a more advanced system of feedback, for example if you click on the like, you could have the options of choosing: 

1 - Informative

This would signify that the information was useful. 

2 - Inspirational  

This would signify that you shared an experience that is of value to others. 

3 - Touching    

This would signify emotional engagement. 

 4 - Innovative 

This would signify that you created highly original content that has merits for its original quality. 

A ULP (unique liking point) system would provide more useful data on audience feedback. To create a smarter quick feedback implementing would be a preliminary step in improving content quality and engagement rapport between creator and audience.  This would in-turn have endless data-mining value, and could permanently change the course of all social media. 

This would create less mindless clicking on social media, which is part of the limitation of these channels currently. If I have to write you a comment, just to tell you I found your article touching, chances are I'm simply going to 'like' it and you will never know.