Announcing the Company Insider Widget
I’m happy to announce the availability of LinkedIn’s Company Insider widget, the first in a family of widgets coming your way this year.
This is a secure and easy way to provide contextual information about companies on your blog or news site to bring your readers closer to the companies you write about, on your job board to connect your users with people they may know at a company, or in any other way you see fit.
Simply copy and paste the Javascript, mark up your content by passing a company name to the widget, and your users now have pertinent access to their LinkedIn professional network.
It’s free to use and available now. Join the likes of BusinessWeek and CIO Magazine — add the Company Insider widget to your site today! Everything you need to get started can be found here.
trackback
http://blog.linkedin.com/2008/05/16/announcing-the-company-insider-widget/trackback/
Alex Miller May 17th, 2008
I’ve read this twice and I still don’t understand what this is or why you would want to use it.
Taylor Singletary May 19th, 2008
Alex,
This is for site operators who want to connect their readership with individuals in companies, leveraging their own LinkedIn network.
If I’m viewing an article about IBM on CIO, and it triggers in me a desire to interact directly with someone at the company because I want a job there, or because I want to initiate a business deal there, or if I’m just curious who I might know at the company — this widget tells me who I know and/or who I might want to know at the company to reach those aims.
The value proposition here that excited me most is in providing context to your users, making the world a smaller a place.
Taylor
Paul May 20th, 2008
Alex,
Great widget. We have a crude version working on our beta site and this will jazz it up for sure. We operate a job board for the Entertainment Industry.
Please help us connect with your fellow developers regarding learning more about what API’s we can include in our next site version which can take our group [SBJ on LinkedIn] and make it more interactive.
We’ve dropped numerous emails to folks and there has been no response. Anything you can do to help get a conversation going would be greatly appreciated.
Check us out at http://www.showbizjobs.com and our LinkedIn group at http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/44880/764E087DF1F0
Paul Buss
Paul May 20th, 2008
Sorry, that last email should have been addressed to Taylor.
Paul
Chris May 23rd, 2008
Im kind of “site operator” and Im sure wont put it to my site. No sense at all, sorry
Riley May 23rd, 2008
Have u tested this in safari…the backgroud is missing
Taylor Singletary May 23rd, 2008
Riley,
We are aware of some minor issues with some versions of Safari and are working to resolve them soon.
Thanks,
Taylor
Clyde Smith May 26th, 2008
Thanks. I’m looking forward to adding this.
Bill Murphy June 3rd, 2008
Taylor,
Within a week of your release, we integrated Company Insider Widget into our Company Summary and Executives Report. This new feature has been rolled out to our Global subscriber base of hundreds of thousands of Sales, Marketing, Consulting and Financial Services professionals.
http://www.onesource.com
How it works for OneSource users:
Our clients look for the Linkedin button in the Key Executives section of our Company Summary or Executive Report. By clicking the button they will see their personal connection at this company. Then by clicking “See all…” open a pop up window with the full list of potential connections.
This widget allows our clients to leverage the rich data within our database and brings it to a more persoanl level-showing them the potential relationship building paths with executives in OneSource and Linkedin.
Great widget
Bill
Brian Hamlett July 9th, 2008
We have been testing this new widget and the “Share on LinkedIn” widget on our new community site for business professionals, business owners, and entrepreneurs. One thing we have noticed that may be important to note. When tested on our site AND on others (such as Crunchbase) and the user is NOT logged in, often times it shows a result of zero users on LinkedIn. However, when we log into LinkedIn, then go to our site (or crunchbase) and click the same link to view results, it then shows the names of people who work for the company. So, even though the demo shows that you can see how many individuals work for that company who are on LinkedIn, it does not appear to work that way on these sites. This is a concern of ours as the users who come to our site may not realize that they need to login (or signup) to LinkedIn to view the correct results. Any ideas what is causing this?
Taylor Singletary July 10th, 2008
@Brian – The data used in the version presented to members not currently logged in is taken from a cache that we update periodically.
Brian Hamlett July 10th, 2008
Ah… that answers it then. Well, I would have to make that a slight negative (knowing this is a new, COOL widgete) mark on this as a tool unless the cache is updated often. For instance, I’ve been a member of LinkedIn for months, probably even at least one year and a search for my company shows zero results. Also, I’m not sure how long the employees of ShopFlick, an example Crunchbase company that I tested, have been on LinkedIn, but they also show zero results when not logged in and around 10 when you are logged in. For large corporations I’m sure this is not an issue, but we are looking at integrating features of LinkedIn into our business professionals news site and many of them have LinkedIn accounts… meaning they also have companies they’re attached to, so we’re afraid that if a user isn’t logged in a clicks to view Company Insider widget for these companies, nothing will show. That makes the widget not really useful to our site as we’ll have many visitors not know to log into their LinkedIn accounts first prior to launching the widget. Seeing as how your company name is already displayed on your public profile, is there a way to run a search/query that can grab this info on the fly?Your thoughts?
Josh Gladstein July 30th, 2008
Hi,
I noticed that job boards are using it and would like to see how they are doing that so I can add it to my job board. Are there any sites I can check out?
Brian Hamlett August 1st, 2008
In regards to my past comments and my continued testing of this widget. Taylor pointed out that when NOT logged into your LinkedIn account, this widget pulls from a cache (that is updated “periodically.”) I mentioned that when this widget is querying a much smaller firm, that it often shows zero individuals employed (not in the cache,) however, if you log into your LinkedIn Account, and THEN use this widget to query the same company, it shows the more accurate results (I have to assume then that it performs a “live” search.)
Well, until the caching issue is worked out so that all firms that are on LinkedIn can have their information displayed correctly (especially if this is used on a “directory-style” site with many types of businesses,) can you not require the person to login to see the results? That would even negate the purpose of caching and at the same time guarantee more accurate results, which makes the tool more valuable for use on our sites?
We have many BETA testers on our site and most of which are smaller firms but 80% have LinkedIn profiles. When their businesses are queried, it shows zero results, so there is no value to showing the LinkedIn integration. If other widgets made by LinkIn require you to login to use (like the “Share on LinkedIn Widget,” then why not this one as well? Just some thoughts.
John Bishop September 25th, 2008
Hello,
First off, I’m glad to see the LinkedIn platform opening up. I think the industry trend is going toward fewer, more open social networking providers – and LinkedIn is poised to be on top.
Secondly, given this direction, I would like to see even more openness! This widget is a step in the right direction, but it would be great to have:
- Support for LinkedIn groups
- Support for pictures and job titles
- Use of this API as an RSS feed, in addition to a ’scripted’ solution
Thanks for making forward progress on opening up LinkedIn. Are there plans to continue to be progressive in opening up the platform even further?
Thanks!
-JB
Benjamin Kennedy October 1st, 2009
Company Insider Widget Matching ( 0 results found) ERROR ISSUE
When the widget queries a company name to return how many employees are on linked in for it, the matching is not functioning properly because of text indexing.
For example, if I feed “Google, Inc.” in I get 0 results found at google, but if I feed just “Google” then it give the results for the number of employees there.
(exact matching of company name code causes bad functionality)
The matching data function, should use BEST MATCH, just like a natural query for companies on the linkedin site works, if that means returning # of companies found, instead of # of employees found, then so be it.
This would still provide much more value to the end user than returning (0 results found), for a lot of queries. I’m sure if you look at the widgets query log, you will see that it is returning 0 results, when it should be driving traffic to linkedin, and giving value to visitors. Please let me know.
Thanks,
-Ben