901am

New Media News Every Morning

LinkedIn Connects with Microsoft Outlook

By

What would you get if two of the major players  in business communication – one a desktop email tool and the other the most popular business social networking site join forces?  The possibility could be endless and most definitely fruitful for both parties. That’s what was just announced by LinkedIn as they’ve partner up with Microsoft Outlook.

The result of the deal could be more productive whether you are a LinkedIn or Microsoft Outlook user. Better if you use both since with LinkedIn connected to your Microsoft Outlook, you’d be able to do the following:

Keep track of what your LinkedIn connections are working on and thinking about – this include information on who they are connecting with, articles they are reading and sharing, questions they are asking and answering.

Get the latest contact information for your professional connections – this include email addresses, profile details and photos appearing in an Outlook Contacts folder. It will also allow you to email your LinkedIn connections just by typing their name into your Outlook “To:” box as you let LinkedIn auto-fill it up for you.

Grow your LinkedIn network easily – this is my favorite feature brought about by the partnership. You can now easily add an email sender who is not yet on your LinkedIn network just by simply clicking on the green “Add” icon next to their name. Easy way to build your LinkedIn contacts.

To use this new feature, you need to follow these simple steps – download Outlook Social Connector from Microsoft, download the LinkedIn Outlook Connector, restart your Outlook and follow the instructions for connecting your two accounts.

Once connected, Outlook will start pushing your LinkedIn network information into Outlook.

Originally posted on February 17, 2010 @ 8:28 am

LinkedIn Now Lets You Drag-and-Drop Sections of Your Profile

By

Responding to the request of  users, LinkedIn has just rolled out a new way of organizing your member profiles. The new feature lets you drag-and-drop different sections on your profile allowing you flexibility and more control on how your profile will be viewed by your current as well as your  potential contacts.

It lets you highlight skills, expertise and experiences, depending on which of these will make you you stand out. Some of the great things that you can do using this new LinkedIn feature include showcasing your work experiences or education or highlighting testimonials given by your business contacts, featuring a slideshow presentation or even synching your WordPress blog with your profile and providing your blog’s feed updates as well.

Best part of course is that you can do all these easily through drag-and-drop method. Just pick any section using  the handles of  the different profile sections from your LinkedIn’s “Edit Profile page”  and then drop it off the area in your profile where you want to place it. When you release the mouse, the section will be dropped to the designated area on your profile immediately.

This new feature follows the new browsing method for LinkedIn address book introduced recently. It’s a pretty cool really. And according to the LinkedIn blog, this is just the start of the many new features that will be released soon.

 

Originally posted on February 2, 2010 @ 4:01 pm

LinkedIn Makes it Faster to Find People with Faceted Search

By

LinkedIn has just launched a new way of finding people on the LinkedIn network – Faceted Search.  It’s actually an enhancement of  the previously rolled out new people search platform.

Faceted Search provides you with dynamic filters generated based on your actual query results. These filters or facets that you can use to filter your LinkedIn search query are – current company, past company, location, relationship, location, industry, school, and profile languages.

You can see these filters at the left-side navigation bar of the LinkedIn search results page. These filters are labeled “refine by” and it includes a list of the most relevant facets which like we said were based on the actual results of your original query.

What makes the Faceted Search more interesting is that the filters are generated in real-time, done by the LinkedIn search algorithm by parsing matching results and then extracting the search query’s most important attributes. You can also refine, expand or stumble upon information just by simply clicking on the search options that are important to you. [Read more…]

Originally posted on December 15, 2009 @ 2:33 am