“WOW!”
“I never used to be able to see who had searched on me, so purchasing the Premium version of LinkedIn for a month would open a door otherwise closed!” Cool!!
In the email that congratulated me on taking out Premium membership I was promised the following perks:
As a premium subscriber, you get these perks:
- InMail™ messages to get the conversation started. [snip]
- View the full profiles of all LinkedIn members. [snip]
- Find the right people, faster. [snip]
- Save and organize new contacts into folders of your choice. [snip]
- See who’s viewed your profile. Get more information on who’s interested in you from customers, to suppliers, to recruiters and more.
Note that: “See who’s viewed your profile”. There’s even a button on the page about Premium member benefits.
All of which would lead you to assume, quite reasonably, I would argue, that you can see the names of those who have viewed your profile. That’s certainly why I bought the Premium package for a month.
So here’s today’s ‘Who’s Viewed My Profile’ box:
“A-HA!” I thought. Let’s see who in Melbourne, a leader in the Management Consulting industry, is looking at my profile…
Here’s what I saw when I clicked on the link above:
Please note that only ONE of them is from Melbourne, and not the first result (which is what I would have expected).
“Okay,” I thought, “let’s see who at Telstra has been viewing my profile.”
Well, it certainly gets a bit more helpful here. Andrew Cronin I know, as I do Jono Haysom (fine Adelaide lad that he is!). But I’m not so sure that I know Peter Habib and Nicole Bordne; that’s not to say I DON’T know them, but just that I don’t immediately recognise the names.
Well, let’s see if someone from the PR and Comms industry in Adelaide who has viewed my profile is someone that I recognise…
Now THIS was a bizarre result: no one – the search result came back showing the first page of people were from cities NOT called Adelaide
So I tried a couple of times more, just to convince myself that there was absolutely no difference between the free version of LinkedIn and the Premium, US$24.95 per month version.
To the search for someone in the PR function in the PR and Comms industry from Adelaide came, surprise, no one from Adelaide. I was getting used to this.
And when looking back down the binoculars to see who had been viewing me from a Leadership function in the PR and Comms industry in Adelaide, I found out that – you are going to find this hard to believe, but it’s true – no one from Adelaide was looking at me.
It turns out – and you only get told of this once you have paid for your premium membership – that names are withheld for privacy reasons. But seeing names was the whole bloody reason for upgrading! Grrrrrrrrr…….
In search of the ‘unsubscribe’ button…
So I decided to cancel my membership. Did you naively think that they would make that an easy process? I laugh at you…
Everywhere I looked, even in my cheery welcome email congratulating me on upgrading my account, I could not find a ‘downgrade your membership’ or ‘unsubscribe’ button.
Sure, I could cancel my account if I wanted to, but that’s being a little bit dramatic!
As we say here in Australia (quoting a TV advert that ran for a while and captured our hearts),
“NOT HAPPY, JAN!”
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