LinkedIn is running a promotion right now to get more people using their advertising platform.
It’s nicely conceived – two clicks (the first to login), and I was straight into writing an advert. Brilliant!
The advert-writing was simple, easy to understand, and fit within the top 500 pixels of the screen – really welcoming. Not at all complicated.
“And then you go and spoil it all / By saying something stupid…”
…like “your email address is dis-allowed”.
My startup doesn’t have a profile page on LinkedIn, so I can’t direct people to it. This hugely undermines the value of running and advert.
I try to create a profile. Takes a few false starts, and then:
“You cannot create a profile for a company unless you can receive an email at the same domain address as the company website”
Oh.
(this is, apparently, non-negotiable)
We don’t even run a mailserver, let alone have an MX record for our domain.
SO … after lots of effort trying to convert me into a paying advertiser, LinkedIn once again shoots itself in the foot. There isn’t even an OPTION for me to sort this out – it’s just a big “fuck off!”.
Sigh.
4 replies on “LinkedIn doesn’t like money?”
Seems like a reasonable precaution against impersonating someone else’s company to me…
Now, they could improve the UI so you’re informed earlier in the process, but I’m not sure turning it into a customer service issue would be worth their time either – particularly since that would be pretty much guaranteed to only generate customer service issues for the small ad buys (since larger companies aren’t going to have the problem of not having an MX server set up).
Also, setting up SOME kind of mail server seems like a simple and cheap thing to do to otherwise improve the professional appearance of a company: why not do it?
I agree that an MX setup isn’t insurmountable (although it’s a lot of hassle to add one from scratch, including all the spam assassin setup – unless you want to pay a 100-200 bucks a year to outsource it to someone trustworthy)
On the other hand, I frequently meet and work with non-technical SME’s that don’t have domain-based email. It’s surprisingly common there.
The pricing for LinkedIn’s service ($100 per ad) is clearly aimed at the SME’s, not the large corporates.
It just feels like a non-joined-up campaign, like they didn’t think it through.
(typing from phone) to put it another way … how, exactly, does this provide “security”? If they’re not doing any actual checks then there’s nothign stopping Random Person X from large corpoate from taking control of the page. If they ARE doing actual checks, then what’s the value of this filter?
It’s security in a weak sense: it relies on something that someone else, if their business were impersonated, could sue the perpetrator for (the domain name) without involving LinkedIn. I think that proves my point, though – how much effort would your business go through to make $100?