LinkedIn Tip: The Newer, More Powerful LinkedIn Address Book
Many of you are probably aware of LinkedIn Groups’ feature enhancements that we announced earlier today. In addition to those changes I’d also like to point out another much requested upgrade that launched today – one that impacts LinkedIn’s Address Book.
Starting today, we’ve made changes that allow you greater flexibility in managing your LinkedIn connections. Here are two easy steps to edit your contacts’ information on LinkedIn.
Step 1: Click through the Connections Tab
Step 2: Edit Contact Information
Of course, it may be a small step but it goes a long way in helping us build out a more comprehensive and robust LinkedIn Address Book for you. Please feel free to leave us your feedback in the comments section.
trackback
http://blog.linkedin.com/2008/08/29/linkedin-tip-th/trackback/
Sheilah Etheridge August 30th, 2008
Are these notes seen by others or just the person making them?
Sheilah
Zia August 31st, 2008
Chris
Great…Thanks. I do love the notes section, it will make it easier for me to identify the origin of my 600+ contacts!
A tag system would be welcome!!
Paul-Espen Torisen September 1st, 2008
This is good news! However, where can we see the note that we have added? It seems that it does not show up on the profile?
It would also be very convenient if we could add tags. Xing has this functionality and it is very practical. For example could clients be tagged as “client”.
Erwin van Lun September 1st, 2008
Thanks for this, but I actually still don’t understand why I have to enter a telephone number of my contact while they can do that themselves one single time. So the question is: why do I have to enter 500 telephone numbers instead of just mine?
Julian Knight September 1st, 2008
I would really like to see an extension to the address book that allow us to to track contacts that we are not linked to. This would allow us to keep track of people that we may not wish to actually link to (for a variety of resons including already having many contacts linked) but still want to remember and especially to make some notes on for future reference.
With regards,
Julian Knight
Joao Ventura September 1st, 2008
A power feature related to this would be the ability to tag people.. This way I could tag classmates according to the school we attended together, colleagues on which company we worked, etc, etc.
Of course, it would only be useful later if I could filter my connections by tags.
João
Prasenjit September 2nd, 2008
Fantastic, Chris. This makes the LinkedIn address book more robust than before. How about adding other filtering criteria apart from location & industry when viewing Connections through advanced options (eg current company)?
Joe Gordillo September 3rd, 2008
Chris,
This looks great. I assume this cvan ‘only get better’ as time goes on, right? Here’s a short wish-list of things I’d like to see it able to do in the future:
1. Synch with other applications such as Outlook, BlackBerry, Outlook Express, Google, etc.
2. Ability to ‘pull’ information that your contacts enter themselves (as opposed to having to type them in).
3. Each person would also be able to ‘categorize’ each of their contacts to determine what information they are “allowed to see” – This should help with people’s concern for privacy (beacuse they decide who sees what).
Congratulations on your work so far and keep up the good work!
Steve September 4th, 2008
I have been asking for a “group” (or tag) feature for ages to help track how I know the people I’m linked with… Alas, after collecting contacts for years on LinkedIn, I now fear the process of having to go back and tag 600 some-odd contacts. So while I also still want this feature, PLEASE make it easy to use by allowing some sort of group, multiple-select or batch tagging, and also allow the ability to search for UNtagged contacts to help figure out who still needs to be tagged.
And yeah, I don’t want to enter contact information for everyone ELSE, but would prefer to let people enter their OWN contact information. Of course, you’ll probably also need some facebook-like privacy settings to let people determine who can see their contact information (unless you decide to just restrict it to direct contacts). However, if you add tagging (or groups), then I could see perhaps wanting to only reveal certain phone numbers to people with specific tags (or in specific groups).
Ben September 7th, 2008
I would also like to see the TAG feature that Steve discussed that offers the ability to split your links into networks or groups so that you can see how you know who you know. As you get more contacts, this becomes more important.
Irina Shamaeva September 8th, 2008
Great feature! Is there a chance to be able to export your address book into a csv file in the near future?
Thanks!
Irina
Joris Claeys September 8th, 2008
Fantastic, one of those things we have been waiting for so long. Hope this will lead way to ensuring people will use international standards for address elements and a start to a better synchronization with Outlook, without bug hick-ups. When can we expect a new Outlook and IE toolbar (without bugs please).
This is definitely the direction we want to see LinkedIn go: making things easier for the user and less administrative. Great.
Sandeep Malviya September 9th, 2008
It is commendable step to make this online interactive IT product more innovative.
I would like to say “Linkedin should have its own Messenger”!
John Hill September 9th, 2008
Great first step guys! How about a dialer icon next to each phone number. Click on the icon and the phone number is dialed. No more misdialed numbers.
Marko Bonaci September 13th, 2008
Why aren’t we able to sort the connections list?
The same question for requests for joining the group.
Just my 2 cents…
Christopher J. Scharer September 17th, 2008
Chris (a great name if I say so myself),
I agree with having this link into what the person had put in their profile for phone numbers, addresses, etc. The other advantage to this ability (or disadvantage to entering the information yourself) is that you would not have to enter all of the information for every contact and you would not have to update the information any time that contacts information changes.
Sincerely,
Christopher J. Scharer
Vivit Iowa Chapter Leader
http://VivitConnect.LeverageSoftware.com/Profile_View.aspx?CustomerID=CScharer
James Mallory September 17th, 2008
First off, this by far the best professional tool I have found – thank you. LinkedIn is fantastic for keeping in touch with colleagues, business partners, and old college friends. From a business perspective, there are some small things that you could do to extend the uses of your product to other markets while still serving your existing, business professional market.
For example, I use LinkedIn to keep tabs on business associates but why not extend it so that I can also use it as my virtual address book; to create an online forum for my family members (for reunions and such); to manage communications to membership groups; or to communicate with my old high school classmates? This would provide a lot of value to me – value that I’d be willing to pay for. Here’s some thoughts.
-Allow members to maintain their own addresses and phone numbers in their profile and optionally expose them to their connections – think about it – how many times do we lose track of someone because they moved? If all LinkedIn members maintain their current contact information then you will always be able to reach friends and family!
-You might consider extending the education section to high school. Reunion.com and Classmates.com have little value and are quite expensive for what they provide – why not bring them to submission and simply extend your features to old high school friends? You’d steel marketshare away from those two sites in a few months.
-More photos – would be great to be able to post a few more photos or to at least see larger photos of members.
-You could easily turn this into a family connections site where family members all join the same group so that you can communicate to everyone in the group and best of all – the family members are responsible for maintaining their own contact information – fantastic for communicating family reunions, announcing births, or sharing photos. A couple quick ads on geneology sites and you’d have a huge base overnight.
-Membership Groups could gain a ton of value using LinkedIn. I belong to a small, professional non-profit and we’re looking for ways to grow our membership. I’m proposing that we create a LinkedIn Group for our organization and have our core membership invite their contacts to join our group so that we can promote ourselves to their contacts so we can at least market to potential members. Just a thought.
Anyay – thanks for this fantastic tool. Looking forward to future features!
neeraj October 3rd, 2008
Tagging, categorising as per the industry of the people and adding a functionality like Plaxo auto contact details updater would go a long, long way in making it a killer app in itself. I would love to have something like this to make much better meaning and sorting of my 1750 contacts… surely others would love something like this. It will make LinkedIn invincible. Are you guys listening?
Mark D. Otley October 7th, 2008
The address and phone number slots are not much use when most of my contacts are not LinkedIn, and if I have that information, I probably don’t need to add it here. Does inputting the birthday info create a reminder? If not, that’s not much help, either.
Having a Notes section is good, but I don’t see much advantage to the rest of it, sorry.
The LinkedIn Blog » Blog Archive LinkedIn Profiles. Meet LinkedIn’s Address Book. « November 14th, 2008
[...] Richman November 14th, 2008 A couple of months ago, I blogged about enhancements to LinkedIn’s address book. Enhancements that increased your ability to customize information [...]
Mark van Huijstee December 21st, 2008
Can we load telephone/address data out our Outlook?
And indeed why not use what the contact has enterd hin/herself?
Richad J. Krasney, CFP® December 26th, 2008
Is anyone at LinkedIn Listening?
For quite some time, those of us who have large LinkedIn Networks have been asking for better tools to manage our network connections. This starts by being able to export full contact information, industry, groups, and other profile information from our 1st degree contacts. It is my view that when I agree to connect with somebody, I also agree to provide them my contact information as part of the deal. Not everyone feels this way, the same way not everyone wants to make their connections public. The public sharing of contacts issue was easily resolved by opting out of this feature in the account settings. I believe the default should be to provide contact info, but that is a separate discussion. What matters, is that the current functionality is completely inadequate and becomes an increasingly larger problem the larger one’s network becomes. Ironically, the people who have the largest networks and the ones who are the most frustrated with this are us paid subscribers. Folks, this isn’t Facebook, it’s a business tool, one that I pay for I might add…Fix this problem or someone will fix it for you by coming up with a better service that caters to your best paying customers. Here’s what I would like:
My suggestion is to use this as a marketing benefit to paid subscribers. As a paid subscriber, I get the ability to download full contact info (if permission is granted by my connection), industry info, title, location, group info, connection preference, and other information that can be sorted either in a spreadsheet, or in the program itself. Ideally, LinkedIn would allow me to create a custom list (1st degree CEO’s, in NY and LA, in Entertainment, interested in new business deals). This feature ideally should also integrate with Outlook. I might also recommend an alliance with a company like Constant Contact or some other newsletter service.
Those of us who have adopted LinkedIn as an essential part of our business have been asking for this basic functionality for quite some time. Folks, this isn’t Facebook, it’s an integral part of my business that I pay you to help me with. If you won’t fix this, I’ll gladly switch if another better mousetrap comes along. Hopefully someone is listening.
Thanks,
Richard