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News Corp In Talks with LinkedIn

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new media newsAnother major acquisition is brewing! TechCrunch has an unconfirmed rumor that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is eyeing the fast growing professional networking site LinkedIn.

Here are some points why News Corp is interested with LinkedIn:

  1. LinkedIn’s strong association with mature professionals complements News Corp’s premier advertising properties aimed at the same market such as Wall Street Journal, The Times, and Sunday Times. Hopefully, this could offset the declining advertising in the newspapers.
  2. LinkedIn’s strong base of 16 million users worldwide, robust growth, and consistent profitablility.
  3. Mature professionals with dry sense of humor do not appreciate its “wackiness” of Facebook. In short, Facebook is more expensive

If the acquisition happens, will News Corp rename it to MyLinkedIn? Just wondering…

Originally posted on November 22, 2007 @ 11:33 am

10 practical tips to boost your LinkedIn profile

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new media newsHaving a LinkedIn profile is quickly becoming a necessity among job seekers for many headhunters and HR representatives are turning to social networks to get the best candidates.

However, it is not enough to create a simple profile and hope that companies will check your account. With more than 14 million members, you need to be aggressive and proactive to catch the eyes of potential employers. The key, my friend, is personal branding.

Fortunately, LinkedIn is offering 10 tips to improve your personal profile:

  1. Don’t just cut and paste your resume. Instead, describe your experience and abilities as you would to someone you just met. And write for the screen, in short blocks of copy with visual or textual signposts.
  2. Use specific adjectives, colorful verbs, active construction (“managed project team,” not “responsible for project team management”).
  3. Write a personal tagline. That line of text under your name? It’s the first thing people see in your profile. It follows your name in search hit lists. It’s your brand.
  4. Write a 30-second description, the essence of who you are and what you do, and use it in the Summary section to engage readers. You’ve got 5-10 seconds to capture their attention.
  5. Point out your skills. Also: particular abilities and interests, the personal values you bring to your professional performance, even a note of humor or passion.
  6. Explain your experience. Help the reader grasp the key points: briefly say what the company does and what you did or do for them.
  7. Add websites that showcase your abilities or passions. Then edit the default “My Website” label to encourage click-throughs (you get Google page rankings for those, raising your visibility).
  8. Make a point of answering questions in your field, to establish your expertise, raise your visibility, and most important, to build social capital with people in your network.
  9. Get recommendations from colleagues, clients, and employers who can speak credibly about your abilities or performance. (Think quality, not quantity.)
  10. Build your connections. Connections are one of the most important aspects of your brand: the company you keep reflects the quality of your brand.

Originally posted on November 19, 2007 @ 1:43 pm

LinkedIn to open their platform to developers?

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No confirmations yet as of this writing, but the idea of LinkedIn opening up their platform to developers is not far from happening.

With Facebook enabling developers to create applications for their network a month ago, LinkedIn is expected to follow suit. Yup, you got it right. Facebook and LinkedIn — an unlikely competition to watch out for. Vallywag has already commented on this, anticipating a battle between the two networking giants:

On the surface, the two couldn’t be any more different: Mark Zuckerberg’s social network has only recently expanded beyond college students; and Linked In is a tool for recruiters, job seekers, sales execs and other corporate drones. But Facebook’s interface is sufficiently clean, and efficient, that it’s attracting a new class of user, the professional.

True enough, the LinkedIn VS Facebook battle is looming in the horizon. (Or, has it already began?)

With about 11 million members to date, increasing with 180,000 new members each week, Dan Nye, LinkedIn’s CEO, is confident that LinkedIn will own the business networking. He said, “people will most likely have a social network for personal purposes, and another for professional and business-related connections. After the inevitable social net shakeout, Facebook and MySpace will remain standing and will compete to supply an outlet for personal self-expression and community. Meanwhile, LinkedIn will dominate the business of business networking — serving as a productivity tool used for professional reference checking, recruiting, and to get expert advice.”

But what if you can have both your personal and business contacts all in one platform? Interestingly, more and more professionals now are using Facebook to invite business contacts and create professional networks — a territory that supposedly has LinkedIn’s name on it. And with more possible developments being considered to upgrade Facebook’s platform, the logical thing for LinkedIn to do is to open up to new development strategies as well and catch up.

Two things that could happen in the next few weeks, or months: (1) LinkedIn to deploy itself as an application on Facebook; or (2) The two networks to take on the virtual battle. Let’s wait and see.

Originally posted on June 26, 2007 @ 5:20 am

LinkedIn Becomes More Integrated with Twitter

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Sometime in November last year, LinkedIn started rolling out some Twitter integration features. If you’re one of those LinkedIn members who integrated your LinkedIn accounts with Twitter, you might also want to go deeper into these integration and install the Tweets app.

This new LinkedIn feature lets you easily find and keep track of your LinkedIn connections on both LinkedIn and Twitter. Once you’ve installed that Tweet app, you can access this from your Profile page by clicking on the “more” tab which you can find at the top of your LinkedIn profile page. Clicking on that “more” tab will display your Twitter public timeline including tweets from people you follow. From that page, you can post tweet to your account.

The new Tweet app also has a new module called – “connection to follow.” What this module does is to give you recommendations on new people to follow which are your LinkedIn contacts.

Another nice feature of the Tweet app is the “connections” category which list down your LinkedIn connections who have already installed the Tweet app. From there you can see their Twitter information, follow or unfollow them and see a sample of their last tweets.

If you’re into Twitter lists, the new LinkedIn Tweet app also lets you create a dynamic Twitter list consisting of your LinkedIn connections. This list displays tweets of your LinkedIn contacts and are updated real-time. It’s like your usual Twitter list built into your LinkedIn accounts.

Alright, enough of this blabber. If you’re into LinkedIn and Twitter, might as well integrate these two accounts.  You may install the LinkedIn Tweet app from this link.

Originally posted on May 25, 2010 @ 8:40 pm

LinkedIn Combines People You May Know with Faceted Search

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And so LinkedIn continues to improve on its site features and functionality. The popular business-oriented social networking sites has just improved on one of its most useful network-building feature called “People You May Know,” a powerful way of finding long lost business contacts as well as for building your professional identity. LinkedIn has combined this feature with another great feature called “faceted search.”

With these two useful LinkedIn features integrated, it is now easier to sort through the list of people your may know by companies and schools. You will now be able to easily page through all of your suggestions on the landing page and quickly sort through them by company or school as well as find out which connections you have in common with other LinkedIn members.

From the landing page of the filtered “People You May Know” suggestions, you can filter the results further by various ways to help you find the business contacts that you may have been looking for or possibly chanced upon somebody which you didn’t think you can reconnect to again.

To see the list of people on LinkedIn that you may know, simply click on the “See More” link on the People You May Know box on your LinkedIn profile page. From there you can start scouring through the list and hopefully gets to find contacts and continue building your LinkedIn network.

Originally posted on May 12, 2010 @ 4:51 pm