LinkedIn – closed for business

Northern Michigan is teeming with movie makers – writers, camera operators, prop stylists, set designers, costumers,  fabricators, cosmetic professionals, directors, actors etc. We’d like to showcase our talent, allow us to more easily find each other and even attract projects to the region by providing ready access to our human resources.

One approach is to build a proprietary talent database, like the West Michigan Film and Video and Alliance’s STARMAP. (Search Talent and Resources for Michigan Area Production). Inclusion requires a yearly fee of between $30-75. There’s no documentation about how often STARMAP helps to organize projects in Michigan, so it’s not clear whether joining is a good investment. Several searches of our region for existing skills yielded no hits, which means that participation is lacking. In my opinion STARMAP does not yet represent the full scope of movie making potential in the state.

The Star Map at WMFVA.

Another approach would be to use an existing commercial database such as IMDB or LinkedIn. LinkedIn seemed especially attractive because of their recommendations and endorsements features, which enable LinkedIn connections to say what they think you’re good at.  Most M3 peeps already have a LinkedIn account – so why reinvent the wheel?

Here’s a LinkedIn endorsement for Film from DC Hayden, illustrating how LinkedIn is much more than mere database – it’s an elegant social media implementation of ‘word of mouth’.

In November of 2013, I launched an M3 group within LinkedIn and asked a few M3 peeps to join so we could test search functionality.  Though LinkedIn’s advanced search would find M3 people, setting up the searches was pretty clunky. To search only the M3 group, you have to first belong to the M3 group!

Researching LinkedIn by setting up an small M3 group…

Testing Advanced Search. Notice the ‘Advanced’ link is next to the search icon at the top of the page, (but not always). The search criteria looks for “camera” in the group “Michigan Movie Makers”…

… and here are the 4 results. So far so good.

Ideally, we would like to do an advanced search of our LinkedIn group from michiganmoviemakers.com, replicating the capabilities already provided by LinkedIn but making them more friendly.  An M3 interface to our LinkedIn group could also build in features similiar to WMFVA’s STARMAP while taking advantage of LinkedIn’s ubiquity and word of mouth features. To make this possible, I applied for LinkedIn’s vetted API developer status in November of 2013. Here’s my application verbiage, requesting specific functionality.

Company Description: Northern Michigan Movie Industry development
Application Description: Michigan Movie Makers is exploring options for building a talent search database to reveal specific skills and experience of our members. Producers bringing projects to Northern Michigan would search our talent database to find the people and resources they need. Since most of our members already have LinkedIn profiles, we’re exploring LinkedIn as the platform. Our goal would be to have all the search criteria on a page of our website, perhaps radio buttons or drop down lists for the sorts of people/skills needed, and that search would bring up results for people who are members of our Linkedin group only, not the entire LinkedIn community. The objective is to allow anyone to search, whether or not they are members of LinkedIn or paying for premium Linkedin service. Currently, Linkedin free service’s advanced search allows the searching of just a group, but it’s a bit complicated. We want to build this capability for independent websites.
Target Audience: Everyone interested in bringing movie projects to Northern Michigan. Of course, this widget could be of general interest to ANY organization interested in a tight connection between a LinkedIn group and a specific website.

A month later LinkedIn approved our application. Note that there was an interim communication, which seemed to imply they were giving our request careful consideration. 😉

Hurray! Then I started shopping for a local developer. After no small effort,  I rediscovered Ed Kauffmann in late February and contracted him to do the job.

The first thing Ed discovered was that LinkedIn expired our API access, which meant we had to reapply – after waiting a month for the approval in the first place. This turned out to be a harbinger, an ill omen. After 2 more months of wrangling with LinkedIn’s vetted API team, the entire effort imploded. Here is Ed’s final report.

Edward Kauffmann <ekauffmann@chartermi.net>
To: Dan Kelly <anything@artisthouse.com>
Delivery-Date: Tue, 27 May 2014 17:56:01 -0600
Re: Final Report

A LinkedIn member has the ability to use an Advanced Search facility, once they have logged in.  One useful way to search is by Group.  The M3 Talent Search was to utilize this ability to search and filter people by Group.

LinkedIn provides an API to make it easier to program custom interfaces which use their data.  In order to gain access to this API, one can become vetted by LinkedIn by filling out and submitting an online form.   A required field on this form is a description of the application one wants to create with the API.

The M3 Talent Search was described in some detail, including the necessity to search for people within a group.  LinkedIn’s vetting for this application was approved, twice.

Despite the fact that LinkedIn’s own Advanced Search tool has the abilities we require for this application and it was logical to assume they would use their own API to create such a tool, and the fact that the API documents list Group related methods and People Search methods with various search facets, it was ultimately not possible to create this application.

Additionally, the list of available search facets for People Search was not listed in the documentation, which was another point of assumption as to what should have been available in the API (i.e. all of them, not leave off the premium facets).

After this project was launched and coding had begun, it was then found that many other people were lured into the same debacle.  LinkedIn’s only answer was that “they would let everyone know if and when this functionality is added” and that they “don’t publicize their development roadmap”.

Needless to say, LinkedIn either mislead us to think the API was capable of Group filtering, or they simply did not read the application description on the vetting request form.  This may have saved them precious seconds in taking days to vet this application, but it was a giant waste of our time!

In order to salvage the project, we investigated the concept of using the LinkedIn API for just the login piece and then to maintain a PHP session to scrape the information from LinkedIn using their URL for the Advanced Search tool.  This proved to be difficult and is ultimately not something LinkedIn wants people doing.

For all their innovation, it turns out LinkedIn’s internal structure is extremely unfriendly to innovation. One might even say dysfunctional. Based on LinkedIn’s features, I expected that the LinkedIn team would be all about working with business, but my experience has been they are pretty bad at it. Don’t get creative or even try to have a meaningful dialog with the development team.

After months of waiting, hiring a professional developer and many pointless emails to LinkedIn customer support, we’re giving up – for now.

The Michigan Movie Makers group on LinkedIn is now open. I would encourage everyone to join and we’ll work with what’s available for now. If we can’t leverage our presence to improve LinkedIn, then we’ll build what we need elsewhere.