Manthan

LinkedIn has launched a new “Q and A” feature on the LinkedIn web-site. LinkedIn is a business oriented social-networking site and it seems to work for a lot of people. Take a look at some suggestions from Guy Kawasaki for improving the value of your LinkedIn profile. Personally LinkedIn has been more of nuisance, especially the part where you cannot decline a contact request, without writing a note about why you are declining. It seems LinkedIn sends a notification to the person initiating the request indicating that his/her invite has been declined. Now coming back to the LinkedIn “Q&A”, I would hope that it generates enough momentum that serious IT Professionals start using it. Or at least people on my contact list start using it. Maintaining a Yahoo Group of contacts and getting them to use it for technical Q&A has been a failure from my past experience.
There are very few forums for “Oracle ERP/CRM” discussions and it is often difficult to get the right approach for some problems. Other niche forms like It-toolbox are doing exactly the opposite of what LinkedIn is trying. They are encouraging people to create profiles and connect to fellow forum users. They are trying to build a social network around their forum users. Getting answers for my questions from one of my contacts would definitely be of higher value, than from total strangers.