But I’ve decided it’s time to revitalize Linked Intelligence. For whatever issues I have with some of the decisions LinkedIn makes, it’s still by far the most useful networking tool both for me personally and for businesspeople, i.e., my clients, generally speaking.

It also seems that a whole new batch of people are discovering it, and thanks to Twitter, a bunch of them are discovering the super-incredibly-useful resource, 100+ Smart Ways to Use LinkedIn. Plus, more people have written more cool ideas about how to use LinkedIn, and I want to include them in the compilation.

Finally, there are potentially now more ways to monetize this (hey, just being honest). There are a couple of great products I’ve participated in, such as Jason Alba’s book, I’m on LinkedIn — Now What??, and (finally!) LinkedIn For Dummies. I’ll also soon have available the audio program I did with Joan Stewart on using LinkedIn to support your publicity campaign.

So if you’re new here, welcome. If you’re visiting again, welcome back.

Image Bart Groenhuizen via sxc.hu

As you may have surmised, Linked Intelligence is no longer a part of the b5media network. It was by mutual agreement, all on good terms. In the simplest terms, 6 posts a week doesn’t work for me, and less than 6 posts a week doesn’t work for them. I had a great experience at b5 — love the staff and my fellow b5 bloggers who I got to know.

But there’s more to the story…

Actually, I’m going to be phasing out Linked Intelligence. I have a few more posts I want to write here, and I do plan to leave the site up indefinitely. There’s a lot of good content I’ve created here over the past couple of years, hundreds of inbound links and thousands of monthly visitors. I don’t want to just toss that away and leave a bunch of dead links around the web.

So why am I phasing out Linked Intelligence?

It’s a combination of things:

1. I’m incredibly busy with other things. This is first and foremost. Between promoting our new book The Emergence of The Relationship Economy, the many projects and prospective clients we’re working on at Link to Your World, my ongoing work as Entrepreneurs Guide at About.com, and so on, I need to reduce the number of things on my plate, and this blog is lower priority.

2. LinkedIn is doing some things very well now that they weren’t doing when this blog started. LinkedIn didn’t even have their own blog until a year ago. It got off to kind of a slow start, but now they routinely announce and explain new features, offer tips & tricks, highlight LinkedIn media coverage and (my favorite new edition) share user success stories. I created this blog to fill a need, and LinkedIn is finally filling much of it themselves.

3. LinkedIn is doing some things far worse now than they were two years ago. LinkedIn has become simply impossible to deal with as someone trying to evangelize their platform. I could give my own personal dirty laundry list a mile long, but I won’t — what they do to other people is more than enough. When I see how LinkedIn continues to ignore and/or mistreat some of its strongest evangelists and power users and refuses to address issues that have been going on for years, I simply no longer want to have my personal brand tied to their brand (that’s OK – they probably feel the same way, strangely enough).

I think LinkedIn is a great tool, and I will continue to use it, advocate it to my business associates, and train clients on using it effectively, but I’m just not going to waste any more of my time promoting it when they are not just unsupportive, but downright hostile to those of us who try to do so.

I’ll be writing some more about this in the near future — not because I hate LinkedIn, but because I love it. I think their current policies are going to drive it into the ground, and I hope that some of the investors and executives are listening, because right now, the real conversation that’s going on among LinkedIn users doesn’t seem to be having much impact on the decision-makers.

5th P of Marketing – First 4 Steps in Social Media Engagement

In it, he describes “the fifth P of marketing” – Participation. He says that companies that want to engage in social media need to do 8 things:

- Be where the users are
- Facilitate easier means of communication with them
- Create brand evangelists
- Be a source of information on the company
- Respond swiftly and honestly
- Start publishing content
- Stir internal company conversations
- Improve product and user experience

So, one year later – how do you think LinkedIn is doing in each of those areas?

I’ve set up a simple survey – just rate LinkedIn on a scale of 1 to 5 in each of those areas.

Feel free to discuss the topic further here in the comments, but please not at the exclusion of responding to the survey, which should take less than a minute. Also, please feel free to repost this anywhere you want – there’s no limit on the number of survey responses, and the more we have, the more meaningful and impactful the data will be.

Image: Marco Michelini via stock.xchng

1. Smart Ways to Use LinkedIn – Earlier in the year I ran a group blogging project focused on using LinkedIn for a specific business task. I compiled and categorized all the entries, plus some other blog posts and articles I’d either found or written myself, and this is the result: over 100 ways to use LinkedIn. If you’ve ever asked (or been asked) the question, "OK, so what do I do with LinkedIn?" — this is the ultimate resource. A few posts here on Linked Intelligence were among the most popular: LinkedIn As Resume 2.0, Using LinkedIn to Find Celebrity Guests, Using LinkedIn to Make the Sale and Following Up on Inside Connections at Potential Employers.
2. Why Use LinkedIn? David Pogue of the New York Times posed this question. And while the list above provides some extensive specific examples, I thought I’d boil it down to the three basic capabilities that LinkedIn provides far more effectively than any other tool I know of.
3. Top Tips and Topics from LinkedIn’s Blog – LinkedIn launched their own blog this year. LinkedIn Community Evangelist Mario Sundar and Director of Customer Service April Kelly both shared some of their top tips on the most commonly asked issues, plus I’ve added a few thoughts of my own.
4. 9 Ways to Get Linked Out on LinkedIn – Sometimes a list of what not to do is a more effective learning tool than what to do.
5. How to Politely Decline a LinkedIn Request – While I recognize there are some shortcomings with LinkedIn’s model, I generally think it’s more valuable for most people to adhere to their recommended practice of connecting with people you know and trust. That doesn’t mean that an invitation from a stranger can’t be an opportunity for networking, even if you don’t want to connect with them until you get to know them better. Here’s an approach to handling those connection requests and steering them towards something more productive.
6. Why Apply Different Rules of Connecting on LinkedIn? If you ever wondered why someone might be willing to connect with you on Ecademy or Facebook or Ryze, but not on LinkedIn, this explains.
7. LinkedIn Dangerous? Forbes Thinks So – Ahh, the Irony points out the sort of love/hate relationship that corporations have with social networking site. On the one hand, Forbes has several official LinkedIn groups. And yet, a Forbes article then turns around and lists engaging in social networks such as LinkedIn (mentioned by name) as one of the ten most dangerous online activities.
8. LinkedIn Makes It Easier to Connect with People You Know, Harder with People You Don’t – One of the big functionality changes on LinkedIn this year was the introduction of the ability to reconnect with former colleagues, classmates and business partners without having their email address. At the same time, LinkedIn made it possible to indicate that you don’t know the sender of a connection request and created consequences for doing so.
9. The Problem with Connecting with People You Don’t Know – LinkedIn can be such a serious topic – I try to keep a sense of humor about it. In barely a month, this become one of the most popular posts of the entire year. For a pointed variant on this, see The Times They Are A-Changing.
10. Sending Batch LinkedIn Invitations – What to Do Once You’ve Uploaded Your Contacts – LinkedIn makes it very easy to upload your email contacts from Outlook, Gmail, etc. But once you’ve done so, do you really want to just send a single generic connection invitation to everyone? Probably not. In fact, doing so will probably get your account suspended. Here’s a better approach.