Getting started with LinkedIn Answers
One of the key features of LinkedIn, is the ability to leverage the “wisdom of the professional crowd” by using a popular feature called LinkedIn Answers. Mike Lin, our senior UI designer, outlines the first five steps one should follow when using LinkedIn Answers for the first time:
1. Post your own question to a website or blog:
LinkedIn Answers now has a ’share this’ link which appears at the lower right hand corner under each question. Click on ‘Share This’ to e-mail the question to a friend, add it to del.icio.us or digg, orgrab a permalink to a publicly viewable URL.
2. View all your Questions & Answers:
From the homepage of LinkedIn Answers you can click on the ‘View all your questions & answers’ link in the My Q&A module (located in the upper left hand corner), or on the ‘My Q&A’ link (located in the global navigation panel).
3. Managing your Questions:
By clicking on your question within My Q&A (see above), you have a few options for managing your question depending on whether or not it’s open or closed.
For open questions, you can:
• Extend the closing date
• Forward this question to people who might be able to help answer it
• Close the Question
For closed questions, you can:
• Choose a different best answer
• Completely hide question
• Re-open this question to answers
4. Subscribe to categories via RSS:
Have a favorite category that you like to answer in? You can subscribe to RSS feeds via several blog aggregators (such as Bloglines) or copy the RSS link to subscribe to an aggregator that’s not listed.
Simply use the ‘Browse’ module in the left hand column to navigate to the category you’re interested in subscribing to, and you should see a link to that category’s feed.
5. Search Answers:
There’s a great depth of knowledge that’s already been collected within LinkedIn Answers. You can use the pull-down in the search box to search LinkedIn Answers from most pages on the site.
Besides working and blogging at LinkedIn, Mike also manages one of the few community blogs on a San Francisco neighborhood called Potrero Hill. Check out other Mike Lin posts on our LinkedIn blog, here and here.
trackback
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bryan August 6th, 2007
Thanks for the cool tips, I’ll use these on my blog, again thanks.
Bryan
http://www.racinsite.com
Allan Benamer August 17th, 2007
Hey! I’ve got a new way to use LinkedIn Answers! It’s still crude but someday if LinkedIn Answers has an API we can make this work automagically.
Check out:
http://urltea.com/193j
It’s a link to my blog and how I used the Yahoo! Term Extraction API to pick out keywords in the Answers that were generated by my question about nonprofits… It’s a great way to extract textual patterns quickly from the unstructured text that you get in LinkedIn Answers.
Douglas Karr August 20th, 2007
Mike,
This is a great feature, but I wish I could query my network regionally as well. Example: If I’m looking for a system administrator in Indianapolis, I don’t want to post to my entire network.
Thanks!
Doug
João Gomes June 26th, 2008
Hello,
I believe there should be a way to give some sort of grading assurance to members that spend time writing answers, because some topics are simply abandoned without any answers being marked as “good” or “best”. If there aren’t any answers that satisfy the question’s author, he should request more input instead of simply abandoning the topic. In fact, Experts-Exchange.com have a devised a good method to solve this problem.
Otherwise, members may be reluctant to use their time on Q&A.
Thanks, keep up the good work!
João
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