CPACareerCoach.com

Special thanks to Neal Schaffer, whom I consider an industry expert on Linkedin. He contributed this blog post specifically for the CPACareerCoach.com audience. You can find more information about him on his blog: http://linkedinquestions.wordpress.com/

There have been many attempts to have a general Q&A website to attract people to ask and answer everything on the Internet.  Over the years, the popularity of these sites has waned to the point that Google has already retired Google Answers.  Yahoo Answers and Answers.com seem to be the only sites that are attracting much traffic these days.  With that in mind, what value could LinkedIn Answers provide to the average professional on LinkedIn that they can’t find elsewhere?

LinkedIn Answers, as with any Web 2.0 application of User Generated Content, will only be as good as the people who use it and the quality of content that is generated.  If you have ever browsed the LinkedIn Answers boards, you may have been turned off by the sometimes lack of quality.  But the demographic is professional, and you can’t ask an anonymous question (your Profile Headline is always displayed together with your question), so the potential that highly qualified professionals are both asking and answering questions is there.  And, indeed, I have found LinkedIn Answers to be of tremendous value.

When would I use it? Well, my domain of expertise is in Social Media as well as Sales & Business Development.  But what if I want to gain expertise from another field?  For instance, I am not an IT person, yet, being a blogger and someone who wants to build a better website, I may want to get people’s opinions of what the best website platform that is out there.  You can ask your close physical network for their opinion, but just as with social networking in general, your answer is always going to be limited by the experiences and diversity of those around you.  What if you could ask that same question to 40 million professionals, many of whom have much more expertise in things that you do?  That is the idea behind LinkedIn Answers, and I have found many experts in their fields answering questions with solid advice.
You can see this specific example that garnered 37 responses here:
http://budurl.com/unf4

If you are in business, have you ever been faced with a problem that you wanted to get a third-party or second opinion on? LinkedIn Answers is there for you.  In fact, by trolling the Answers boards, it is possible to find business.  I have given my own business to people that have given me advice on LinkedIn Answers.  And, as more and more people discover the value in LinkedIn Answers, I believe there will be more business out there to gain.

The beauty of LinkedIn Answers is, as with a lot of LinkedIn connections that I have, there are a lot of pay-it-forward networkers out there willing to give a helping hand and answer a question.  On top of that, LinkedIn gives those whose answers are chosen as the best an Expertise Star, something that sticks with them on their profile that can be even searched for on the Experts Database in the LinkedIn Answers application.  This gives many people incentive to try to show off their expertise, and this is another way you could brand yourself on LinkedIn.

If you have yet to ask a Question before, try doing so.  I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with both the quality and quantity of responses.  And if you are an expert in something, which we all are, why not donate some time each week to answering a few questions and helping people out?  LinkedIn provides us the tools for social networking.  It is up to us to utilize them.