#dealwithit

Real quick- I created a new LinkedIn Group- Tumblr for Businesses, Agencies, and Brands.

Tumblr is a bit underrepresented in many ways. I’ve been waiting around for certain things to pop up regarding Tumblr, thought I’d take matters into my own hands.

You’re welcome to join:

 http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Tumblr-Brands-Agencies-Businesses-4782228

This post is mostly for geeky, but non-dev agency folks.

Many of you have fancy, featureful, but bulky and burdensome reporting and monitoring tools for social media stuff. But sometimes you just want find One. Thing. Fast.

Without bugging the technology team.

And you can!

While lotsa marketing folks may not be programmers, many self-identify as “nerds” and are willing and enthusiastic about using little building blocks that get close to “programming” but stop just short of that.

Let’s begin:

Many of us know how to find Facebook share count:

http://graph.facebook.com/http://yoursite.com

(plugin any URL at the end)

Example with a URL from my Tumblr:

https://graph.facebook.com/http://bluechoochoo.tumblr.com/post/25889624609/uniqlo-firstborn-pinterest

Output:

{
   "id": "http://bluechoochoo.tumblr.com/post/25889624609/uniqlo-firstborn-pinterest",
 "shares": 13
}

But what about LinkedIn? What’s the equivalent quick-n-dirty? (I didn’t know before an hour ago.)

It goes a little something like this:

http://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?url=http://yoursite.com

Example with a URL from my Tumblr:

http://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?url=http://bluechoochoo.tumblr.com/post/25889624609/uniqlo-firstborn-pinterest

Output:

IN.Tags.Share.handleCount({“count”:10,”fCnt”:”10”,”fCntPlusOne”:”11”,”url”:”http:\/\/bluechoochoo.tumblr.com\/post\/25889624609\/uniqlo-firstborn-pinterest”});

That’s it. Pencils down. Just paste those tricks into your address bar, and your wrists will be saved from tons of annoying clicks.

I’ll be honest- I haven’t really been taking LinkedIn seriously. I’ll spare you my grand theory of why all symmetric-relationship social networks (Like LinkedIn and Facebook) are way less interesting- that’s beyond the scope of this post. But I will say among people I know, way more professional opportunities and networking events have come through sites like Twitter. (To say nothing of non-professional stuff like art, news, etc.)

But recently I’ve been debating/discussing LinkedIn with some folk who have been bugging me to give it a really fair shot. So I am. I caught up on some “connections,” took the summary seriously, etc. #itsaprocess.

After I fulfilled all the symmetric obligations and supplied my structured data, I immediately licked my chops for good old unstructured discovery. You know- the stuff that makes twitter, tumblr, and pinterest so serendipitous.

This led me to LinkedIn Groups. If you’re reading this I probably know you from my geek (data science, python, ruby), seo, or advertising circles. I went looking for pretty much anything that fit into those areas. Honestly, I didn’t expect to find that much good geek stuff. If anybody has a lock on highly-developed, topic specific discussion areas, it’s geeks. We’ve got so many great watering holes (stuff like the StackExchange empire, sub-Reddits, Hacker News…), that I wasn’t surprised to find LinkedIn geek groups mostly populated by desperate recruiters. But even for other topics, LinkedIn Groups look pretty bleak. Many are ghost towns. And when you filter for activity/recent postings, there’s just a lot of “FIRST!” types of link posting with no commentary/interactions.

Can somebody tell me I have this wrong? Is it an open secret that you’re not really supposed to use LinkedIn Groups? Or are we supposed to find out about the good groups *off* the site? Do you have any favorite LinkedIn Groups? How did you find them?

Is my main problem that I’m trying to use LinkedIn for discovery/sharing/teaching/learning, when other people use it just for resume stalking?