Did I Beat LinkedIn to the Punch? Announcing the “New” LinkedIn Personal Plus Paid Account?!?

By Neal Schaffer

LinkedIn has always fascinated me on if and how they release information on their new functionalities or services.  On the one had, the LinkedIn Groups Product Forum LinkedIn Group, often moderated by LinkedIn employees, is very open with releasing information on future roadmaps as well as welcoming feedback from the LinkedIn community concerning LinkedIn Groups.  On the other hand, LinkedIn releases a beta feature (like their new user interface, for instance) to only a small portion of their users but writes a blog post announcing it to everyone.  There have been other beta features that have only been released to a portion of the LinkedIn population that were never publicly explained, one of which I detailed in my previous blog post on LinkedIn Features: Does Everyone Have Equal Access? But the best one of all is a paid service that I could find no public mention of but was able to recently sign up to.  Have you heard of the new LinkedIn Personal Plus Account?

I was only able to find out about the new LinkedIn Personal Plus Account by random chance.  It was in a response to a LinkedIn Status Update I wrote introducing my connections to my blog post on The New LinkedIn Profile Organizer: Worth the Upgrade? My good LinkedIn friend from The Netherlands, Ronny Lam, commented,

“At $60/yr for www.linkedin.com/personalplus I think it is worth the upgrade. I like the feature.”

What?  A LinkedIn paid account for only $60 a year?  I could not believe it.  First, I went to where I always go to see how I can upgrade my account: the Account & Settings page in my LinkedIn account.  Guess what I saw?  The same thing that you probably see every time:

Where is the LinkedIn Personal Plus Account Option?

If there was an option for a Personal Plus account, why would it not show up here?  I quickly went to the link that Ronny had provided me, and voila! the following screen appeared:

LinkedIn Personal Plus Account

If you know me and read my LinkedIn book, you will know that I have never subscribed to a LinkedIn paid account (although I do understand for some individuals and companies there is value).  But this seemed to be too good to true: a “hidden” paid service that was only $5 a month and came with some benefits.  Why not?  To be honest with you, I still didn’t think that I would be able to subscribe to it, but the payment screen came on and now I am a paid LinkedIn member!

The interesting thing about this “new” LinkedIn Personal Plus account is that this is not a new service at all: LinkedIn announced the LinkedIn Personal Plus service in a press release I found dated November of 2005.  So is this something that LinkedIn has kept on without advertising?  Or is this something that they plan to re-release soon?  Who knows, but it gets back to the point that I brought up in the first paragraph of this blog post in that LinkedIn is really strange in what information they release to who and what they keep “hidden.”

So is the “new” LinkedIn Personal Plus account worth the $60 a year?  As implied by the above image, here are the benefits that you receive:

• Anyone can now send me a message without using up an InMail or an Introduction through the “OpenLink” feature.  It makes me more accessible to anyone and everyone.  Of course, I am already a LinkedIn LION so I am as accessible as they come, but this is a nice-to-have for those that are not LIONs.
• I received 5 more Introductions that I can use at a time bringing me to 10.  To be honest with you, I really don’t use the Introduction feature, and if you read my book you will know why.  So this is another nice-to-have.
• I am now an official “OpenLink” member, meaning that there is now an option to find and be found as an “OpenLink” member when doing Advanced People searches.  What exactly is “OpenLink”?  It is, in essence, an officially sanctioned “opt-in” network of those open to receiving communications from other “OpenLink” members.  But what happens if an “OpenLink” member sends me an IDK?  Only time will tell…  However, if I was looking to begin a conversation with someone that I had never met before and wasn’t connected, I would tend to contact someone with the “OpenLink” logo (the one next to my LinkedIn Profile Name) first…of course if you are the one initiating the contact, you don’t need to be an “OpenLink” member yourself to see this and contact them.  So the value of “OpenLink” with the existence of LIONs is questionable.
• I finally get to see all of the people who have viewed my profile, but it doesn’t add much more meaning to the five people that I have already seen.  Lots of confidential names.  I don’t see any value in this unless everyone displays their name.
• I do get “priority” customer service and other fringe benefits of membership, but unsure as to what the value is here.
• The interesting thing is, as my friend Ronny implies, I also do get access to the new LinkedIn Profile Organizer.  Yes, I did write recently that with some exceptions I did NOT think that this feature was worth the $25 a month upgrade.  But, at $5 a month, I would consider the upgrade.  Why?  If any of you are starting to use the new Twitter Lists, you can already see the value of lumping contacts together into “lists.”  The Profile Organizer lets me organize my contacts by location and type of contact.  If you network a lot like I do, the feature is actually pretty handy.

So is it worth the $60 upgrade fee?  At $5 a month, if you are a heavy LinkedIn user, it may be worth it just for the Profile Organizer as well as the additional 5 Introductions (if you use them) and the “OpenLink” status if you are an open networker.  Ronny actually wrote a blog post that went into more detail on the advantages of the Personal Plus account, so please read it here.

I never thought that 1) I would become a paid LinkedIn user and 2) I would be recommending the new Profile Organizer, but then again I never imagined I would find about this “secret” Personal Plus Account for only $5 a month!  So there you have it!

Did you know about this option?  Are you also a Personal Plus Account holder?  Would love to hear from you!

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