LinkedIn's New Catch-Up Feature: A Missed Opportunity?
Understanding the Concept of Ambient Awareness
1. Too Many Contacts; Not Enough Real Relationships!
2. Little to No Value Add
3. The Noise vs. Signal Problem
If you've been on LinkedIn recently, you might have noticed something new catching your eye. The My Network button has been lighting up with alerts more frequently, prompting curiosity about what's going on. Clicking on it, you'll find that LinkedIn has introduced two new sub-navigations: Grow and Catch-Up.
Grow remains focused on connection invitations, keeping track of who you've invited and who has invited you to connect. Catch-Up, on the other hand, aims to centralize updates about significant life events of your connections—such as job changes, birthdays, work anniversaries, and educational achievements. It's an intriguing concept, presenting rows upon rows of milestones from people in your network.
For example, LinkedIn may prompt you to congratulate Mike for completing seven years at his company, offering options to give a thumbs up, leave a comment, or opt out of seeing such updates from Mike in the future. This structure is a notable effort by LinkedIn to enhance engagement and interaction within your professional network.
While this new feature has potential, there's still a lot of room for improvement. As someone who has spent decades studying and teaching the art and science of relationships, I see LinkedIn's attempt to make networking more personal and engaging. However, the implementation of Catch-Up seems to miss the mark in adding the nuance and intelligence needed to truly elevate professional relationships.
Let's talk about the idea behind LinkedIn's Catch-Up feature. Social scientists call this concept ambient awareness. The idea is that the more knowledgeable you are about your relationships, the more effectively you can nurture them.
In theory, LinkedIn's Catch-Up feature is designed to enhance your ambient awareness by keeping you updated on important milestones within your network. At Avnir, we see great value in this idea and are working to incorporate a dramatically deeper level of this concept into our Relationship Bank platform.
However, despite its potential, LinkedIn's Catch-Up seems lacking in execution. LinkedIn, with all its resources, often struggles to deliver features that truly evaluate the true value of our business relationships. When I look at Catch-Up, three major issues stand out, and unfortunately, none of them are positive.
The first issue is the overwhelming number of transactional contacts versus meaningful relationships. Many of us have amassed hundreds, if not thousands, of connections on LinkedIn. But how many of these connections do you really know? And how many have moved along a continuum to become real relationships?
Scrolling through the Catch-Up feed, I often find myself staring at names I barely recognize. I don't know Mike, Justin, Marina, Deb, Brian, or Jamel. This flood of updates from people I don't have a real connection with underscores a significant problem: LinkedIn has become similar to the old telephone white pages. Rows and rows of unfamiliar contacts I don't recall or could tell you anything about!
Social media, in general, has regrettably propagated the blurred lines between transactional contacts and deep, meaningful relationships. The Catch-Up feature, while well-intentioned, exacerbates this issue by flooding users with updates from a sea of acquaintances (at best). It highlights the superficiality of many of these connections and underscores the need for a more intelligent, context-aware approach to relationship management.
The second issue is the lack of contextual relevance. These updates often don't align with my world, my goals, or what I'm trying to achieve. Instead of adding value by helping me nurture meaningful relationships, they end up wasting my limited bandwidth.
I suspect many people are experiencing the same frustration. They either ignore these updates or, worse yet, use the three little dots to stop seeing updates from certain connections. This not only disengages them from those people but also rejects the possibility of forming a meaningful relationship.
By failing to provide contextually relevant updates, LinkedIn's Catch-Up feature falls short in its goal of enhancing professional networking. For this feature to be truly valuable, it needs to prioritize updates that are relevant and meaningful to each user based on their unique relationships and professional profile, interests, and aspirations.
The third issue is the sheer volume of updates that create a lot of noise. Most of us don't have the time to sift through endless notifications, and in the midst of all these updates, the truly important ones get lost.
The people I genuinely care about—those who have changed jobs, had birthdays, celebrated work anniversaries, or achieved educational milestones—are lost in the clutter. The feature isn't personalized enough to highlight what really matters to me. This lack of intelligence makes it hard to discern the updates that are relevant to my interests and priorities.
Imagine if LinkedIn could tell me that a valuable client of mine has moved countries. That's relevant to me, and I want to know and talk about it. However, LinkedIn doesn't know that because the feature isn't smart enough to understand or prioritize my relationships.