Buzzwords 2011: Who's been ‘creative’ and ‘effective’ this year?
With the New Year right around the corner, the LinkedIn team thought it would be a great time to refresh one of our most popular analyses from last year - overused professional buzzwords! Maybe during the last year …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second installment of a franchise: LinkedIn ran the same overused-buzzword countdown on profiles exactly one year earlier, in December 2010, and is now refreshing it with 2011 data. The repeat itself is the story — LinkedIn is turning its own members' profile text into an annual editorial product, timed to the New Year's resolution season when profile rewrites peak.
The move also fits LinkedIn's longer engagement push: back in July 2007, TechCrunch's 'traffic up, but is it enough?' framing put the network under pressure to give members reasons to return between job changes, and shareable data analyses are one answer to that.
First-order effects
- Members whose profiles lean on 'creative' and 'effective' get an implicit nudge to rewrite their summaries before recruiters read them against the flagged list.
- LinkedIn gets a low-cost, high-shareability content asset built entirely from data it already holds — no reporting or licensing required.
Second-order effects
- Career coaches, resume writers, and profile-optimization services gain a fresh annual hook, since each December's list resets their pitch about which words to cut.
- Rival professional networks and job boards face soft pressure to publish comparable self-audits of member language, or cede the year-end conversation to LinkedIn.
Third-order effects
- If the annual cadence holds, LinkedIn normalizes the idea that professional self-presentation should be continuously optimized against platform-published norms — a template for turning user-generated text into recurring media and, eventually, into premium advice products.
The trend: Professional networks are converting their proprietary member-data troves into annual editorial franchises that drive engagement and define the vocabulary of self-presentation.