I am one of the fortunate ones. I have been the beneficiary of many endorsements on LinkedIn from my network of colleagues, community members and friends. Being endorsed for a skill feels great, like a virtual pat on the back. Having them for my expertise in digital strategy has resulted in at least two clients, so they are financially valuable too.

Having all those people vouching for my skills is certainly more meaningful then just claiming I have that expertise. Eventhough they are not verified or connected to any actual work that can be validated, it is a step in the right direction in helping me silently present my qualifications.

Until they become something else. Until the game mechanics built into the design to gather more data points changes the way we behave. Which is what I suspect is happening to a lot of people, as recently happened to me.

Whenever I visit Linkedin and I see those four opportunities to give an endorsement to someone, I fall right for it. If the area of expertise is legitimate for that person, I endorse them. If I am unsure, I ignore it, but wonder if they are really good in that area or not. Then I endorse the next one, and the next. Then skip all. Then I endorse a few more and on it goes for a minute or two until I realize I need to get back to work and get something else done.

But the other day I went to view the profile of someone I wanted to email and I saw it in a completely different way. I saw it as a way to let them know I was thinking about them. Then I realized that it was also a great way to get myself in front of someone who hadn’t replied to a recent email without being too pushy about the follow-up. That’s when I realized that the endorsement had become the equivalent of a poke as much if not more then an endorsement.

Which made me wonder whether or not other people were using it to poke their connections as opposed to the pure endorsement that it was meant to be. So what do you think? Are LinkedIn endorsements a new form of poke? Or is it something much more meaningful for you?