Tag Archives: LinkedIn

All Things D is reporting that professional social network powerhouse, LinkedIn, will be buying contact start-up Rapportive. The deal isn’t official (yet) and there’s nothing on either Rapportive or LinkedIn’s blog, but seems there are sources saying that it will happen. Not wanting to comment on the validity of this rumor, I wanted to instead focus on the fact that this would be a great deal in the making for both companies – should this actually happen, that is.

In case you’re not familiar with Rapportive, it’s a service that integrates inside Gmail to provide you helpful information about your contacts right inside your inbox. So if you’re crafting an email to a business colleague, that contact’s information and social graph (as long as it’s public) will be displayed right on the screen where you might normally see Google ads being displayed. This is especially helpful since you’re going to get to apply some more context to your emails to help make it more personal. Since its founding in 2010 by Rahul Vohra, Martin Kleppmann and Sam Stokes, the goal of the service was to allow people to immediately see what people look like (using social media avatars), where they’re based, and they do. And just like the name implies, the service is meant to help people establish a rapport that can lead to more conversations, relationships, and success. There’s no doubt that Rapportive has been successful in this area as over 20 million lookups are being done through their system every month!

So why the sudden interest by LinkedIn? Since LinkedIn is the 800 pound gorilla in the professional social network scene, it makes sense that creating some sort of rapport is essential to getting any business done. Whether you want to connect with a potential business partner, looking to hire someone, or even want to be the one that’s hired, a Rapportive-LinkedIn marriage would be beneficial for the end user. Since Rapportive is right now available on Gmail, one might wonder about it’s limited nature and how good it will be in the long-term. In a report by Return Path, at the end of 2010, Gmail had over 193 million users – granted it’s way less than Yahoo! and Hotmail, but it’s picking up steam at a much faster rate than the other two. In 2011, Comscore estimated it at 260 million users, meaning that it’s drastically catching up to the email leaders. So eventually in the near future, Gmail will be the dominate leader in email service and with Rapportive’s integration, LinkedIn will have a great opportunity to extend professional profiles further out there.

Even ReadWriteWeb agrees that LinkedIn and Rapportive would be a match made in heaven. And with LinkedIn’s last acquisition of business card scanning technology Cardmunch, LinkedIn would be able to bolster its offering and create a warehouse of professional contact information. I’ve always wanted to find a way to take all the business cards that I get from conferences and events and mesh them into a contact relationship management system and have it all linked to a professional bio that is updated and associated with my email address book so all I have to do is type in that email address: john@johndoe.com and find out how I know him, how things have been since we last talked, and make the email more meaningful. No longer will I need to waste unnecessary emails chit-chatting…it can all be personal again.

Jon Mitchell from ReadWriteWeb probably puts its best:

LinkedIn is already the go-to network for work contacts. It’s the most comprehensive professional profile most people have. Plus, it’s already openly making moves to be a more extensible service, bringing its human resources know-how to other sites that need it.

Ideally, it would be a great move for both teams and the hope is that this isn’t one of Silicon Valley’s most famous “acqui-hires” where they go for just the talent and not the technology. It is definitely a compatible service and will be a boon for people using LinkedIn.

Photo Credit: “Don’t you come a step closer” by Ed Yourdon/Flickr

Recruiting Disrupted: What’s Your Online Score?

Finding the needle in a haystack in search for the right talent is getting harder as the traditional recruitment models are being disrupted by social networks and increasing number of online services for professional resumes. True story: While professional social network LinkedIn just passed 100M members, growing at a rate of 1M new members per week, an executive recruiting agency just had a seminar on topics ”What is LinkedIn?” and “The difference between Twitter and a chat?”. They better hurry. The landscape is rapidly moving towards social recruiting services in verticals, good example being the newly launched Careers 2.0 by Stack Overflow, offering programmers create free online resume that weighs in their forum activity.

“No longer will your resume be your own version of your work history; it will also include a data-driven third party’s assessment. You will also be judged by your network, online activity, level of contribution, all adding up to your online score. The next time you look for a job, don’t be surprised if someone asks you for your score.”

“How much are you worth and would you opt-out from social scoring systems?”

Student Competitions Harnessing World’s Top Students

Want to show your support to your favourite brand, cause or event? Wish to reward your frequent customers and increase brand loyalty? Find a way to endorse your friends and colleaques?

Don’t worry, there’s a badge for that!

What Foursquare and Gowalla didn’t know, when they first created badges to reward user check-ins, was the massive snowball effect of badges they were about to start, now swiping over the social web like there’s no tomorrow. Everybody’s gotta have one.

Brand Awareness and Loyalty

As Loic Le Meur,  founder and CEO of Seesmic, reminds us, building your online brand is NOT about you, it’s about highlighting others. Badges work as a great vehicle for endorsing and highlighting others, while at the same time strengthening ones own online presence and brand.

Brands are quickly catching up on combining marketing efforts with game mechanics and social networking. One of the interesting companies in the space helping brands to achieve their goals is GetGlue, a social network for entertainment. Users can check-in and rate tv shows, movies, music and books to discover new favorites, see what friends are into, earn badges and even get a free copy of the sticker sent in the mail, for free. In September, over 500 000 users had created 10 million new unique ratings and check-ins, the official and authorized badges coming from major brands like HBO, FOX, Showtime and PBS.

As GetGlue explains it: It’s about emotions, enabling users connecting with the content. Check-in to Mad Men, anyone?

Connect with content, reward engagement and frequent users is also something CNN iReport aims to do by launching “On the campaign trail” badge for those participating in the iReport Election Challenge. More badges and surprises are reported to be released.

Even Q&A service Mahalo Answers has hopped on the train of badges, finding them a great and complementary way to engage and reward its frequent users.

Besides from encouraging user activity and increasing brand loyalty, badges can also be a way to create scarcity around, as to increase search engine ranking, of a brand, company or an organization.

Basno is a new platform that offers authenticated badges either to be sold or given away to users. With help of unique serial numbers, embedding unique invisible watermarks, and creating 2d bar codes for each instance of any badge on the platform, Basno aims to increase the value of digital goods through limited issuance of badges. The badges are stored in a vault, but can be shown on all major social networks.

Social recruiting

As many other industries, recruiting is also being disrupted by the social web, offering new ways to find, refer and match talent with job openings. In addition to competition from professional social network LinkedIn, now listing over 70 million members and one million company profiles, there is an increasing number of niched services like Endorse, helping people connect through friendly recommendations, and Twitter stream filling up with hashtags hunting for talent. How the yet to be launched Work Market, a marketplace for employers and workers with promise to make work work, is to disrupt the recruitment business, remains to be seen.

Founders of Estonian Emp.ly, a social recruiting service expanding the reach of job postings via social networks, are also creators of Talentag, your social CV online. Talentag makes it easy for people in your network, professional or private, to give you career boosting kudos in form of badges and thumbs up. By answering questions and giving thumbs up, or down, a chart with personality traits, such as cheerful, friendly, sophisticated, trustworthy, or giving, gets added to ones profile. Fast, easy, and yes, a playful way to endorse someone in your network. All endorsements can then be displayed and distributed on Facebook. Sign up with your Facebook or Linkedin account and see whether you also are to be endorsed as a Social Media Rockstar?

Talentag also offers event organizers a possibility to let event participants claim and display event badges on their profiles. A quick and visual way of listing my past events from Plancast or LinkedIn, for example.

As a good general rule of thumb when designing to include any type of social endorsements in your service, neither badges nor recommendations are simply just to be given away, they are to be earned.

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She is also a mentor for startups at Seedcamp. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Connect with her on Twitter, LinkedIn,
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

By Julie Blaustein

PR Summit Boot Camp, produced by Shaun Saunders of Graffiti PR and held in San Francisco, brought together experienced speakers in the PR world who provided great tips and insights into how the media and you should be embracing today’s changing landscape. The old and the new protocols of PR 2.0 are starting to blend and with it are new ways of going about doing the business of PR. At the end of the day, it was agreed by all that the key to successful PR is to create, foster and engage your personal and your businesses contacts along with those in your community to create your networks both online and offline.

Social Media & New Media Protocols Panel

There are a number of tools available at your fingertips to engage in social media. The burning question is, what social media tools are the most productive and which are the time wasters? The Social Media & New Media Protocols panel addressed this by asking the seasoned PR speakers how they go about their day in terms of social media. Myles Weissleder of Mylermedia still feels email is the best tool to focus on to do important communications. “Although its beneficial to check your Facebook and Twitter streams numerous times a day, doing so can take up all your time. And if your network is large, it can be like a fire-hose providing you too much useless information.” Daniel Lemin, formerly of PainePR and now the founder of Social-Studio digests his daily news through newsletters which he considers the most credible source of information. He then turns to his Twitter and Facebook streams but strictly for business, to seek out information about his own campaigns. His tools of choice include Hootsuite, TweetDeck, LinkedIn, Cadmus along with in-house proprietary tools. Preston Lewis of Bonfire Communications uses social media throughout the day to build awareness of events to come that night. “My personal and professional lives are blurred on Facebook while Twitter is strictly professional.” And Ryan Singel of Wired.com’s Threat Level views navigating websites as the best source of information and starts his day off by viewing numerous content aggregators through open tabs. He also finds Flipboard and the search engine Duck Duck Go most useful.

Facebook’s Manager of Corporate Communications, Matt Hicks, shared how to grow a company’s fan page. He used Facebook’s own Fan Page as an example of a successful Fan Page. It was launched after the Haiti Disaster and already has 14.8 million people who have Liked its fan page, 9 million monthly actives and 1 million daily actives. It has been promoted in organic ways such as through photos, videos, a link to its blog and is always creating fresh content. Each time you publish an update on your Fan Page with  photos, videos or links it will automatically go out into the News Feeds of all your fans creating not only virality but enabling your content to be searched and found by others. In addition, sharing content on YouTube and Twitter and directing users back to your Facebook Fan page also keeps them engaged.

Akilah Bolden-Monifa, Director of Communications with CBS5 | The CW44 cable 12 and CBS Radio has had decades of experience in the media. Although she receives tons of pitches through Twitter, FB and email for news reports, the reality is that most of the news comes from the wire services. If you are going to do a pitch, she suggests to keep it simple and keep in mind the basic 5 W’s – Who, What, When, Where and Why. To her, the Press Release is dead and ineffective for getting press. She toots the horn for Twitter. Being brief and to the point might get her attention while long wordy press releases, especially with attachments, will most definitely not get her attention.

The Old Spice campaign was brought up numerous times throughout the day as a great example of how using Social Media has revived an old brand. We all associate it with the smell of our grandfather so how did it become the phenomena it has become? Thanks to the cunning creativity of the ad agency Wieden + Kennedy and the help of Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, millions of people have viewed the campaign. Daniel Lemin summed the hit as a result of them taking risks and pushing boundaries. “They factored into their campaign that people want to be entertained, add that with the shock factor and you have a HIT.

Much more was discussed at the PR Summit Bootcamp and it was all captured on Justin TV. And check out Amie Vaccaro’s great summary of the confrerence in, “Graffiti PR’s 12 Tips for reaching Your Audience.”

Speakers Teresa Rodriquez, Alkilah Bolden-Monifa and Liana Burtsava

Myles Weissleder, Shaun Saunders and Leyla Fara

Ryan Singel of Wired.com's Threat Level

PR Summit Bootcamp Audience

Wow.

That’s a big number, especially when you consider that most people think of LinkedIn as the “boring” social network. They’re not wrong. When I teach a class on social networking, I include LinkedIn. But I also stress that it’s very professional, unlike Facebook, and that most people aren’t posting status updates about their cat on LinkedIn.

Where are these 50 million connections? According Jeff Weiner on the LinkedIn blog,

LinkedIn has been global since inception — about half of our total membership is international.  There are now 11 million users in Europe alone. India is currently our fastest-growing country with almost 3 million users, while the Netherlands has the highest rate of adoption per capita outside the U.S., at 30%.

I bet that’s not surprising to you. It’s certainly not to me. Personally, I use LinkedIn to track potential jobs and clients, as well as research potential jobs and clients. You can learn a lot about a company based on who used to work there. Additionally, I try to answer several Questions on their Q&A pages on a regular basis. It never hurts to be known as an expert in something.  I list it on my business cards as well – it’s an instant resume where I control the amount of information that’s viewable. LinkedIn is, in my opinion, sort of like Old Reliable. It doesn’t frighten social media newbies (and yes, they’re out there) as much as Facebook and I can trust that it will probably be around for a while.

Do you still use LinkedIn or do you find it has outlasted it’s usefulness?