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Quicktake: Extend LinkedIn’s Community To Your Website

Categories: Social CRM, Social MediaPosted on November 23rd, 2009

I was briefed as an analyst by Adam Nash, LinkedIn’s Vice President, Search & Platform Products to learn about today’s announcement around opening their network as a platform.

Announcement: Access LinkedIn Data From Other Locations Using The LinkedIn Platform
Starting today, developers worldwide can integrate LinkedIn into their business applications and Web sites. They’ve announced that OAuth os now available at Developer.linkedin.com.  Like Facebook Connect, this means that any website or any web application can allow users to login from their LinkedIn account on a third party site, and even publish information back to their LinkedIn profile and network from that third party site.

What It Means To Business:

Connect the Affluent, Educated, and Active Community To Your Site
The stats are obvious, they have a network of 52mm (a sixth of the size of Facebook’s 300mm+) engaged individuals that represent decision makers and those that aspire to be upwardly mobile in their career, view the stats page to learn more. In fact, over 51% earn more than $100k+ a year, and 23% earn more than $150K+ annually. Over 77% of community members have a college degree, making this an educated bunch, yet It’s not just about quality of community, their is an apparent degree of site activity, LinkedIn’s site rivals that of Forbes, and even the WSJ.com, according to Compete.

Your Business Applications And Website Should Never Be “Alone”
If your company is in B2B or trying to reach business professionals, chances are you have an application for them to use.  Now, as you launch them, you can quickly integrate with the LinkedIn platform, this way personal data is already populated.    This also goes for your corporate website, provide your users the ability to see which one of their LinkedIn contacts has been there, and encourage them to interact with your site and trigger messages back to their LinkedIn news page –fostering word of mouth.

LinkedIn Data To Be Pervasive
CIOs must wake up and realize the value of social networks, even last week, LinkedIn announced a partnership with Microsoft Oulook, extending it’s profile information to legacy email systems.  Data will get pre-populated, meaning your contacts can be viewable within the context of your existing emails, empowering you to know more about who you’re meeting even though you’ve never met.  We should expect in the future that existing Intranet networks will connect their LDAP to the LinkedIn profile.

And yes, if you haven’t noticed yet, the speed on innovation on the social web is increasing at a rapid pace, things are happening faster than ever. To get a good sense of the evolution of LinkedIn, I’ve created this matrix which shows it’s evolution and some predictions of where things are to head.

Web Strategy Matrix: Evolution of LinkedIn

LinkedIn Evolution Example Status
Destination Social Network LinkedIn is a destination social network, users to there, login and only communicate within the confines of the domain. Since it’s inception in 2003, this is how it’s been.
Application Platform Allows third parties to build applications that sit on the LI domain and interact much like Facebook’s Platform In Oct 2008, A small hand-selected group of companies like Box were allowed to do this, it’s not currently rolled out to others.
Portable Data Third party websites can allow users to login using LinkedIn identity, see which friends are also present, then spread information back to LinkedIn.com. This is today’s announcement, Nov 2009
Personalized Experiences on Third Party Sites Third party websites can provide personalized content to first time users by recognizing their LinkedIn profile. Prediction: Mid 2010
Social CRM LinkedIn partners with SalesForce, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, to allow data in LinkedIn to quickly be exported to CRM systems. As customers have queries or support issues, the CRM systems will trigger notifications to brand managers. Prediction: Late 2010
Augmented Reality Using mobile devices, users can quickly hold a device up a cell phone in front of a peer to see their LinkedIn data –without even having a conversation. Prediction: 2011
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This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 10:06 am and is filed under Social CRM, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments
  • rogerharris
    This is a wonderful development for advocates of social media as a messaging channel, as well as a great opportunity for developers. Many business users who have taken to LinkedIn but are reluctant to engage other social media will see the value of integrated social systems. Those apps that are first to be out of the gate with open platforms will be those that will be incorporated into our "personal information management systems."
  • wow THAT took them long enough... it's about time
  • For a corporate community marketer, the hardest thing right now is understanding where we are in all this evolution. Great framework Jeremiah; thanks!

    It's important to have your *strategy* nailed down and to communicate that to executive management, because your tactics are going to be changing every quarter with new ways of connecting to places like Facebook and LinkedIn, and you'll look like a kitten chasing a string back and forth if you don't have a strategic framework to operate in.

    Also, the rapid evolution means that it's even more important for Community and CMS vendors to step up and integrate asap. We can't afford to keep doing more integrations with custom code - that needs to be part of the platform.
  • Mark thanks. I find it's best talking to executives about social by never mentioning the tools, instead focus on customers, and how they communicate differently with each other --and your employees.
  • But the conversation often starts there: "What's our LinkedIn Strategy?" Then you have to drag everybody back up. Thank goodness that sites like LinkedIn & Facebook are starting to share a bit more of their roadmap - because even with per-platform tactics we need some warning!

    Thanks again for both emphasizing the big picture but yet not forgetting the tactical pieces!
  • Christopher Coulter
    Making some social databank of dubious value, your CRM supplier, is an exercise fraught with problems.

    1. Data is not clean. Filled with ego-puffery, social-networking, Pyramid scheme, Social Media, MLM and outright scamming hucksters. Primerica-like reps de jour. No verification checks on the outlandish claims, like "education" and "income levels". Further, lots of the data is quite dated, which is sometimes worse than no data at all. Making up and reselling bad data, something Google and the Choicepoints already created Empires from, now yet another new input.

    2. Same dataset, provides zero competitive advantage. In fact, tapping into the commodity data, provides a competitive advantage to those NOT using it, when you have better investigated and more detailed data.

    3. Most of the LinkedIn population set, is already trying to sell you something, targeting this bunch is a MLM false economy.

    Current customers are the best sales force, don't outsource their handling to some social 'shiny toy' third party. Just get your CRM system in serious order, and ignore all the noise.
  • good to see Linked take deeper steps towards being a master social media aggregator. they are really the only serious b2b social-net - which bodes well for them as "social business" takes root in the corporate world.

    if anyone is interested in learning more about social media aggregation (predictions on where the market is headed) - you can check my preso from a talk I gave a few weeks ago. there's some dove-tailing with jeremiahs evolution matrix: http://www.slideshare.net/kgerr/social-media-ag...
  • LinkedIn has become so much more robust in the last few months, it's wonderful and increasingly useful. But they do such a crummy job of communicating that fact. I wonder how many users who thought they new it's capabilities have not revisited since first learning to use it/and or setting up their initial profile. LI would benefit by an ongoing marketing effort to current users to get them to upgrade or at least make better use of it.
  • It appears LinkedIn has put the right roles behind their announcements, and they've also had a change in CEO leadership, let's see how it pans out.

    Maybe they'll take a note from Facebook's play and expose their roadmap for developers.
  • nallaiwickreman
    Jeremiah, Excellent post on LinkedIn Open API. Using LinkedIn data, new applications will emerge to target the decision makers. We are running a campaign to target decision makers from Aerospace industry. LinkedIn open API will trigger us to launch a simple aerospace simulation tool to target them
  • MrLoftcraft
    There are already websites that have embraced the LinkedIn platform already. It seems that the event had many people waiting for it to start. And when I say website have alteady embraced the new option, I mean big sites that will be starting an aggressive advertising campaign using LinkedIn.
    ____________________________________________________
    Web Site Traffic
  • rsferrari
    Great news re: LinkedIn. Jeremiah, you mention that the LinkedIn Microsoft partnership now means that 'your contacts can be viewable within the context of your existing emails'. I've been using Xobni for almost a year now and it already does this. In fact in integrates LinkedIn and Facebook and Hoovers. It's an amazing app and great timesaver. BTW, I don't work for the company or own any stock in it. ;-)
  • Very informative post and good to be able to see more into the future.
  • We're actually starting up a social web presence soon, and we were hoping to enable LinkedIn profiles of participants. Now that looks like it will happen. RIght on! Go LinkedIn!
  • curious how your augmented reality app would work? Facial recognition via photo? Chip implant?

    Serious privacy concerns with that prediciton.
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