Kevin Nichols is a Sr. Litigation Paralegal, President & CEO of KLN Publishing, LLC.  He’s also a columnist for The Globe Newspapers in the East Bay, and he writes for various publications nationwide.  As an active LinkedIn user, Kevin also moderates two LinkedIn groups, one of which he used to pull off a networking event for free. Check out his experience below. You can also find other stories from our users here.

LinkedIn is the premier social networking site for business professionals. It is the most consequential tool that I use to reach my business goals. As the moderator of the Downtown San Francisco Networking Group, I organize monthly and quarterly events for professionals who work downtown to network to create business opportunities for them.  I am personally concerned that a large percentage of our group is unemployed due to the economic downturn, some for almost a year! So, I decided to organize an Employment Symposium that will focus on improving resume writing skills, interviewing tips, how to prepare for, how to dress for, and how to follow up an interview. Because these individuals are unemployed, cost is of paramount concern. Skeptics suggested that this may take at least 3 – 4 months to plan and cost thousands of dollars.  Here is how I have use LinkedIn to organize this event for free in a month, like I have done for all of my previous events for my group.

First, I needed a location that could hold at least a hundred people comfortably so I updated my status indicating such. Within minutes, a colleague – Janine Mixon, Dean of Student Affairs at Golden Gate University – said that she might be able to get me space for no charge. Through my networking group, Janine introduced me to her colleagues David Javate (Assistant Director of Sales) and Ami Readdy (Recruiting and the Associate Director of Business Career Coaching), who both agreed to allow us to use their facility for free, provide resource materials, career guidance and placement information, etc. as parting gifts, assistant with obtaining panelists and with completing the planning.  After another status update, I obtained two businesses that agreed to sponsor the food for the event. Finally, upon searching through my LinkedIn contacts, I have leaned on my Fortune 500 recruiting contacts to donate their time by being panelists / facilitators. The moral of this story is, “Use your network to make the impossible, possible”.

Have a LinkedIn experience you’d like to share with us? Submit your story here.

Ed Brill is the Director of Product Management for Lotus Notes at IBM.  He is also a blogger and frequent traveler who loves the integration of TripIt with his LinkedIn Profile.  Today’s post is about how IBM is mashing up all of those tools to help make people like Ed more productive.

Millions of business professionals around the world enhance their daily productivity through their use of IBM Lotus Notes. When we delivered Lotus Notes 8, a key objective was to provide a “desktop of the future” — one that could integrate all of the content and information people need to be productive in a single client.  Instantly, developers all over the world were building widgets, plug-ins, and extensions to tie together corporate collaboration and user-customized information and content.

This week, IBM and LinkedIn are announcing the availability of the LinkedIn plug-in for Lotus Notes.  This easy to use add-in dynamically displays LinkedIn profile, status, and other information in the Notes 8 sidebar.  The new plug-in is a great example of “contextual collaboration” — where users access relevant information without having to leave behind what they are already working on.

I am excited about the LinkedIn plug-in for Lotus Notes.  It provides a much greater sense of collaboration and connection to the people I interact with every day by instantly increasing my knowledge about the author of e-mails and other content.  It leads to interesting discoveries of background, interests, projects, or education.  The benefits in improved relationships make this a must-have for Lotus Notes users, and a good reason for you to check out Notes if you’re not already using it.

For more information on the LinkedIn plug-in for Lotus Notes, visit http://www.linkedin.com/lotus

This is a guest post from our user, Linda Ruck, who runs her own Public Relations and Event Management consultancy in Singapore, Linda Ruck Communications (LRC)  with “a focus on personalized service”. In this post, she shares her best practices on how LinkedIn helped her win three global clients for her small business. You can find more of our user stories here.

Being a small business owner carving out a niche against the big players is very challenging. As with any small business you need to develop viable strategies, seek out opportunities and be creative on how to promote your business, all with a limited budget!

My LinkedIn profile has attracted clients and generated leads and referrals from the US, UK, Australia and throughout Asia seeking to hire expertise to organize their events or run their media and PR campaigns in Singapore and the region.

LinkedIn has proved to be an excellent marketing tool for LRC and more importantly has given me a global presence. My first success though LinkedIn was when I was contacted by a multinational company based in Boston which required a PR consultant in Singapore to support their Asian expansion plans. The company searched LinkedIn to find a PR company in Singapore who had expertise dealing with US based companies. LRC was one of a few companies short listed and after the initial contact and several conference calls they picked my agency to run their inbound media campaign. Having a robust, up-to-date LinkedIn profile definitely helped. Since then I have worked with this company every time they have had a project in the region.

Through opportunities in Linkedin, I have also worked with a $500 million company in the UK who contacted me through a respected mutual Linkedin contact to do their inbound media campaign in Singapore. We were also successful in winning the PR project to launch lavera, the fourth largest organic skincare company in the world.  And we have worked with several other multinational companies listed on LinkedIn, who either found us through common introductions or the LinkedIn’s advanced search.

In addition to my robust profile, I also actively participate in relevant user groups on LinkedIn. Groups is a great platform to engage in discussions and connect with like-minded professionals to learn and share, whether it’s for business or personal interest. And, most importantly, helps establish my thought leadership in a space I’ve carved out for myself as a small business owner.

Linkedin has definitely helped make my company, Linda Ruck Communications, a global player.

Have a LinkedIn experience you’d like to share with us? Submit your story here.

Code Alert! This is a part of our continuing series on Engineering at LinkedIn. If this isn’t your cup of Java, check back tomorrow for regular LinkedIn programming. In the meanwhile, check out some of our recent feature announcements, tips and tricks, or success stories.

Java One 2009 has come and gone, and once again the engineering team at LinkedIn had the opportunity to make a few presentations that we’d like to share on the blog. Earlier this week, Brandon and Yegor shared their presentation in this blog. In addition to that, Dhananjay and I, were given the opportunity to deliver a technical session at Java One 2009 on how LinkedIn stores its data. A grand time was enjoyed by the both of us, as we regaled some 200+ engineering folks on how we have built our services to manage the data storage platform. The presentation was extremely well received and we just learned that our session was chosen as a Top session at the conference and will be linked to from the Java One conference homepage.

In addition, we’ve also received requests for a copy of the slides from many of you, so we have embedded it in this post as well. Please feel free to share this content with your peers and stay tuned for more around this exciting area on the blog. Look forward to hearing your comments.

[Ed. note: This is a guest post from Kathy Steele, Vice President of an integrated marketing firm that credits networking as the key to their growth, and who discovered how vital social media sites like LinkedIn have become to their business process and success]

I have to admit for a number of years I was under-utilizing the resources on LinkedIn. Recently our company has joined the conversation by embracing social media as part of our integrated marketing plan, and now we work with our clients to establish Web 2.0 strategies.

We use LinkedIn to leverage the experience of our group members, vet ideas, create new connections and re-establish relationships to increase sales and publicize the achievements of our clients and ourselves. We have even found that in our sales process, sending an InMail has garnered a much higher response rate than using email or phone contact. We have just found that when we send InMail vs email we have been getting a response in the same day where we may have had no response in the past. In addition, we have also been able to be more prepared for a meeting by viewing a contact’s profile in advance. This has had significant impact on the timetable of our sales cycle, particularly in the cases when we respond to a blanket RFP or quote.

More recently, we’ve also found ourselves on the speaking circuit more often thanks to a LinkedIn Poll. By responding to a LinkedIn Poll we were found by the Chicago Tribune who asked us to weigh in on social media best practices. Recognition in the article has helped secure three new speaking gigs, which wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

We are so impressed with the results we are spreading the word! We have been speaking to groups of CEOs, affiliations and chambers about how to use LinkedIn as well as other social media tools in their marketing mix. Social media messaging takes time and commitment, but the return has given us credible visibility and exciting new opportunities to present our capabilities to interested prospects.

Code Alert! This is a part of our continuing series on Engineering at LinkedIn. If this isn’t your cup of Java, check back tomorrow for regular LinkedIn programming. In the meanwhile, check out some of our recent feature announcements, tips and tricks, or success stories.

At this year’s JavaOne conference Yegor Borovikov and myself had the opportunity to present details of our RESTful API framework. Our Birds of a Feather presentation is titled “Building Consistent RESTful APIs in a High Performance Environment” and it describes our use of a coherent domain model as the foundation for our APIs. Flip through the various slides in the embed below and feel free to leave a comment or two.

Also, stay tuned for another Java One Presentation from my colleagues David Raccah and Dhananjay Ragade, later this week.

[Ed. note: This is part of our success story series where users share their tips and tricks on using LinkedIn more effectively. Today's user experience comes from Dan Gellert, a Grammy award winning audio mixer, engineer and producer. He's also the co-founder of Jitterbug.tv that he started with his partner recently, a venture that LinkedIn helped them greatly with]

Building the technical backbone of the site, I asked the LinkedIn community to comment on best practices for streaming media, advantages of different media players, budgeting bandwidth costs, etc. Taking advantage of the eyeballs and expertise on LinkedIn, the answers enabled me to understand the average mode of operation; and more importantly, gave me the vocabulary and right questions to ask moving forward on a variety of topics.

Moving to logo and brand design, through launching and especially now, marketing and spreading the word – LinkedIn has helped me waste less time on areas I am not an expert in.  Finding people who are influencing the kids music niche has been fairly easy using LinkedIn. Scanning peoples profiles, what and how they write quickly gives me a sense of their direction, expertise, involvement and relevance to me  – now that is useful!

As we started defining the navigation of jitterbug, LinkedIn was one of a few sites I referenced – noticing how it made potentially messy navigation simple and clear gave me understanding… and a bit of hope!  Adding my profile link on outgoing emails to people who I am trying to woo into action – I found this adds some credibility for those who need some prodding.

The fact that LinkedIn has a huge user base and that you can cross reference users answers with their profile – for me, this makes the experience transparent and helpful.

Have a LinkedIn experience you’d like to share with the community? Please submit your story here.

[Ed. note: This is a guest blog post from Ron LaPedis, Principal at Seacliff Partners and describes his journey from being laid off to becoming an entrepreneur with some help from his LinkedIn network]

I am an entrepreneur who was always afraid to quit my day job. I sold rock concert T-shirts in college and even after I began work in the Silicon Valley, I started selling high-end fountain pens from Realpens.com and writing articles for industry magazines. These were little more than hobbies until my first pink slip showed up, after I’d spent nearly 29 years in the industry. After exiting the building and taking stock, it was obvious that networking was the answer. The scuttlebutt was that few people were being hired off the street and recommendations to managers were worth their weight in gold. Using LinkedIn’s advanced search feature, I reached out to old friends and co-workers for references but instead discovered that many of them were independent consultants and actually making a living at it.

While still searching for a full-time job, I began the work to become a trusted adviser on my favorite topic – protecting businesses and people when something goes wrong. I used LinkedIn Answers to get tips and tricks from my contacts on how to set up a consulting business including the need for liability insurance and why I should incorporate as an LLC. To prove my credibility, I used the WordPress application on LinkedIn to publish my regular blog post entries on to my network. An Australian friend of mine saw my posts on LinkedIn and recommended me to a company in Los Angeles. My first contract came quickly, in fact before the ink was dry on my incorporation papers. After that I was requested to author an online article and was paid to write and give two educational sessions at a technology conference – and this all started with a LinkedIn contact.

I am absolutely convinced of the power offered by LinkedIn and I tell all of my friends to build their networks, use the search feature to find people at targeted companies, and get recommendations from co-workers.

Jeff Weiner has updated his profile from President to CEO of LinkedIn.

Six months ago, Jeff started at LinkedIn running our day-to-day operations as President of the company. During that time we’ve achieved record operating and financial results. Prior to LinkedIn, Jeff was an Executive in Residence at Accel Partners and Greylock Partners. Previously, he spent over seven years in key leadership roles at Yahoo!, managing businesses and products that reached over half a billion consumers worldwide. Jeff’s experience building multiple products on a global scale is highly relevant to LinkedIn and will be critical as we continue to grow the LinkedIn professional network around the world.

I look forward to working with Jeff as he leads the company. He and I share the same vision for Linkedin: connecting the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. In the new world of work, every professional should establish their own brand online; every professional engages their network in order to connect with the people and information they need to compete and succeed.

While Jeff leads the company, I will focus on some big picture strategic issues for Linkedin – how Linkedin evolves to become more and more essential to professionals seeking to stay informed and find the right resources to accomplish their tasks fast and effectively.

We’re very excited about Jeff’s role as CEO, leading the company towards helping all professionals become connected and successful.

Reid Hoffman
Founder & Executive Chairman

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Ed. note. Check out Techmeme for related stories here or click through these individual links: TechCrunch, All Things Digital, New York Times, Associated Press, USA Today and Business Week.

[Ed. note: This is a guest post by Dawn Jordan, former operations vice president at Bank of America, whose job was eliminated last year. Also, check out Dawn's blog series on the Wall Street Journal where she describes her quest for a job in the midst of these trying economic times]

On any given day, it seems I could attend an event and meet the individual who will be key to landing my next job.  This is because my email inbox is constantly loaded with invitations and announcements for upcoming professional networking events.

My challenge isn’t a lack of time, interest or need to attend these networking functions, it is lack of money.

Pre-layoff I thought little of registration fees for such activities but post-layoff is another matter.  Their expense has been an unanticipated cost of unemployment.  As a result, I too often find myself foregoing events that  I would prefer to attend.  The longer I am unemployed, the more often I expect this to happen.

Inevitably, I find myself torn between feeling as though I can’t afford to go to an event but that I also can’t afford not to go.

What makes matters worse is that career service industry experts agree networking is one of the most critical components of a job search.  They say that especially in weaker  economies you are more likely to find your career opportunity through networking and not on job boards.

This is where online social media tools such as  LinkedIn, and Meetup.com help.  They allow me to extend my reach and meet people for low or no cost.  When you consider typical networking expenses can easily exceed $400 per month, leveraging these resources is a no-brainer.

One of the ways I use LinkedIn to extend my networking budget through the “Groups and Associations”.  I look for local chapters of organizations as well as groups in the functions and industries where I desire to work.

I join groups and then contact members on an individual basis.  If they are located near me I’ll request to physically meet, otherwise my goal is a phone call.  The shared group connection makes it easy to connect and increases the likelihood they will make time to talk.  Long-term, I retain connections to organizations and peers that can continue to contribute to my professional growth.