Mike Davis's Weblog A blog of what I'm learning and thinking as I go through my days at Sun.

LinkedIn as a leading indicator

I've been using LinkedIn for a few years now to manage contacts of colleagues that I work with or have worked with. It's mainly a way to keep in contact with a network of people that might be able to help with a job search should the need arise. Recently (the past 3-4 months), a current colleague of mine (mon collègue français préféré) and I have noticed a significant increase in the LinkedIn activity of people at Sun. We see this by the number of people that ask us to join their network, or once you're in someone's network, you can see the number of new people that they add to their network on an ongoing basis. With the publicly announced layoffs at Sun the traffic on LinkedIn has hit a crescendo.

Not only do you see these upturns in traffic when layoffs are eminent, but when a group of people, say a particular organization is unhappy with how things are going and do not feel confident in the direction that things are headed. I believe that LinkedIn could sell this type of data! They could sell it to directors and VP's to be able to gauge the response to recent changes and directions that they are taking their organizations. They could sell it to wall street analysts who want to gauge the employee confidence in the company that they work for. They could sell the data to recruiters who want to know where new recruits or new position openings may be coming from. Wow, there are virtually unlimited possibilities of cool, but likely useless things you could do with that date.

Anyhow, join my LinkedIn Network to help throw the data off.

Posted by mikedav ( Jun 22 2006, 05:49:40 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [3]