A: LinkedIn is a network that allows professionals to manage their entire career. It starts with basic things like finding a job, being productive, hiring people and sharing knowledge with peers. Of late, the job recruitment features have become quite popular due to the recessionary economy. In the past couple of years, there were job cuts in most parts of the world whereas India was creating job opportunities. Certainly, there is a business element for us in promoting jobs on LinkedIn. If you see carefully, we have two business lines: One, we refer to as ‘marketing solutions’ which consists of advertising and self-serve products. Second, we refer to as ‘hiring solutions’. Hiring solutions are a suite of products built for recruiters. Average consumers don’t know about them. Our fagship product ‘LinkedIn Recruiter’ is extremely popular in India.

We live by a slogan: “LinkedIn works where the professional works.” That means the end users need not come to us every time. LinkedIn will reach out to the users. The integration with Microsoft Outlook, IBM Lotus Notes, iPhone and Palm is a real-world manifestation of this.

Indian users are among the most evolved ones. Not many CEOs of Internet companies are able to make bold statements like the ones Indian CEOs make. These users know how to make optimum use of our free products. The level of engagement which an average Indian LinkedIn user has is far more than that of users from many other countries. There are already well over 4 million Indians using LinkedIn. During November 2009, we announced that LinkedIn is adding 70,000 new users every week. The number is signifcantly higher today. The challenge for us is to get these users to look into the ‘mirror’ and help them meet their expectations. We don’t have to do much. We have to surface the ideal users and teach the whole universe how to use this platform to their advantage.

A: Groups are arguably one of our strongest features. LinkedIn hosts over 500,000 professional groups today. Thousands of such groups are created every day. A 100,000 professionals join these groups every day. In the end, user behaviour decides what product makes sense and what doesn’t. Our responsibility is to guide and constantly educate the users on how to use these groups. Certain groups, based on industry vertical and practices, thrive because of their inclusive nature: they assimilate every one. Certain others thrive because they are closed and specialised. A CMO Group run by Jessie Paul, Chief Marketing Offcer of Wipro, is a classic example of how to run a closed group successfully. This group is ‘by invitation’ and it shares the best practices in marketing across the world.

A: Absolutely! There are multiple stages to it. Basically, our endeavour is to empower professionals. This means, the control should lie with professionals and not with us. We provide a lot of tools to empower the moderators of these groups. Alongside, we also educate users, moderators and the advertisers on best practices. Notwithstanding the fact that malicious intent is the biggest cause of problems, sometimes people do wrong things out of sheer innocence. Education plays a big role to mitigate such risks.

We have a product called in-mail, which enables users to reach their third degree connections. It can be misused by people who want to spam. We protect the interests of users and ask them to fag off these users. If we get repeated complaints about a user, he is stripped off his privileges. This is to protect the vast majority of our free users. Over 90 percent of our product development efforts and innovations are targeted at free users. We are committed to protect their interests and privacy.

A: Knowing that groups are a large part of our business, we have seriously evaluated real-time conversations. But we do want to keep the platform clutter-free. Without going into the details of product development roadmap of our company, I would say that our endeavour is to always enable the users with better functionalities. One aspect that the product development teams always keep in mind is to not come in the way of people linking up with each other. Features like video conferencing are interesting but is there a critical mass using it? And if it is a corner-case feature, we may still push it out, but if the infrastructure doesn’t support, the user experience is not going to be good and that’s where we draw a line between ‘good-to-have’ and ‘must have’ features.

A: The biggest mistake that users commit is not completing and subsequently updating their profles. LinkedIn is a highly search-engine optimised site. In more than one ways, the LinkedIn profle is a professional’s online brand. At the same time one must not mistake it for a resume because there are things that you may want to hide from a large part of viewers. But it does give you other functionalities like sharing slides, getting recommendations, creating alumni network, groups etc.

The richer you make your profle, the better are your chances of being found. LinkedIn's cornerstone is the unwritten social contract of trust and reputation. My biggest message to Indian users of LinkedIn is to complete their profle. We will use our best technologies and solutions to help you use the platform optimally.