Is LinkedIn one step away from becoming the world’s largest performance management system?

I got an email today from some former colleagues (and current friends), adding me to a project listing on LinkedIn. “Very cool” I thought. Then, I did a double take. What’s to stop LinkedIn from getting rating from everyone who’s ever worked on a project with me? Lots of TM providers don’t even do this yet…

I don’t know what the plan is, but I would love to get my hands on the big data that results!

The Rise of Social Spam

I received my second piece of spam from LinkedIn today and dissected the features of new spamming practices on social networks. How can I tell it’s social spam?

1. I don’t know Gina.
2. Gina has a whole 5 connections and is the member of 1 group. This is very likely a fake account.
3. Gina has no reason to think I care about social media (my profile isn’t geared to social media particularly).
4. There is only 1 actionable item, clicking on the web site.  (Check out the site, it’s a good spam venue.)
5. I checked out the name placed on the “forward”  - also a fake account.
6. There is no webinar link or presentation.

And who really would buy this line? . “Yes, you can forward this to a few people, howver, please do not blast it to your whole network” If I were their social spam editor, I would have told them this was overkill.

There is an entry for Social Spam on Wikipedia. I just slightly modified it (mostly for lack of time to be thorough).