The LinkedIn Analytics team has been hard at work finding new ways to help you leverage your network and connect you to resources that can enhance your career. Some of our other features include People You May Know and Who’s Viewed My Profile.
Today we’re introducing a new module to help you find groups you might like to join. We’ve recently deployed enhanced group functionality, and many of you have already joined the lively discussions in your groups. The “Groups You Might Like” module will help you find alumni groups from your schools and previous companies, as well as groups that similar professionals have found valuable.
You can find the module in the lower right hand corner of the LinkedIn homepage:
Not everybody will have the module – you might have already joined all the groups we’d like to suggest, or your profile might have too little information for us to help.
Here are a few ways you can help us suggest more groups you might like to join, as well as improve your overall LinkedIn experience:
1) Enhance your profile
Your profile is your professional presence on the web; you can ensure it represents you by highlighting your professional interests, expertise, and describing your previous positions and education.
If you’ve never been pursued by a carnivorous predator in the workplace, you’ve probably never stressed in the way Mother Nature intended. Instead of stressing about immediate survival, professionals stress over deadlines, job security and the economy — not the kind of life-threatening moments stress can help resolve. As Dr. Robert Sapolsky tells it, humans constantly turn on stress responses for the wrong reasons, and it’s killing us.
Sapolsky’s National Geographic special, “Stress: Portrait of a Killer,” airs nationwide Wednesday night on PBS. The special explores what 30 years of baboon research have taught Robert about stress, and how humans have a knack for turning psychological dis-ease into physical disease. We had a rare chance to sit down with Robert and sought to apply his groundbreaking research to the common office primate.
Ever wondered how important grooming is to putting stress in check? Find out:
All documentary footage courtesy Stanford/National Geographic.
Beyond the four key tips Robert offers for reducing stress, he notes the importance of friends and grooming, which are “much more predictive of health than your rank.” This can be applied to the professional sphere and networking online. LinkedIn helps professionals maintain a network of quality relationships which should accurately reflect their offline experience. As Robert says, “Primates don’t get a lot of solace from 2000 friends” — build a reliable network of people you know and trust. Instead of literal “grooming”, professionals need recognition and approval from peers to help reduce anxiety, depression, or neuroses. A simple virtual application of this need is met through LinkedIn Recommendations, a service by which LinkedIn users can express approval of each others’ work, which in turn enables them to feel good about their accomplishments and pursue greater opportunities.
This week on LinkedIn Answers, Robert asks, “When it comes to balancing stress and professional achievement, how do you decide when ‘enough is enough’?” Follow the link to weigh in with your own solution to balancing stress or to find out how other successful professionals are doing just that.
UPDATE: A related article from Lifehacker notes that workplace envy causes employees to collaborate less and withhold information, according to a study by the University of Notre Dame. For those that missed the special Wednesday night, it’s available for pre-order on Amazon for a November 18 release. In addition, you can download a few free podcasts from iTunes which feature lectures by Dr. Sapolsky.
Recently in a LinkedIn LED hack day, I got a chance to play around with data to analyze the social graph. In order to compute some results in real-time, I needed an efficient way to find the shortest path between two nodes in a graph and Dijkstra’s algorithm came to mind.
Dijkstra’s algorithm is a graph search algorithm that solves the single-source shortest path problem for a graph with non negative edge path costs, outputting a shortest path tree. This algorithm is often used in routing. –Wikipedia
I searched on the web a bit, but I couldn’t find a Ruby implementation so I decided to write my own. It ended up being pretty easy to implement. I decided to post it here in case someone in the future wants to save 30 minutes or so implementing it. Please note that it makes use of priority queue library which is written by K. Kodama.
require 'pqueue'
class Algorithm
INFINITY = 1 << 32
def self.dijkstra(source, edges, weights, n)
visited = Array.new(n, false)
shortest_distances = Array.new(n, INFINITY)
previous = Array.new(n, nil)
pq = PQueue.new(proc {|x,y| shortest_distances[x] < shortest_distances[y]})
pq.push(source)
visited = true
shortest_distances = 0
while pq.size != 0
v = pq.pop
visited[v] = true
if edges[v]
edges[v].each do |w|
if !visited[w] and shortest_distances[w] > shortest_distances[v] + weights[v][w]
shortest_distances[w] = shortest_distances[v] + weights[v][w]
previous[w] = v
pq.push(w)
end
end
end
end
return [shortest_distances, previous]
end
end
Parsing the significance of an incoming business inquiry can be tough. In the case of Jeffrey Taylor, he passed off a lead — who found him on LinkedIn — to the patent department, telling them, “Don’t spend all that much time with this person — this is not a billable hour.” When the patent rep returned two hours later, he let Jeffrey know, “They just gave us $250,000 worth of patent work!” Ostensibly the contract covered the hours required for the phone call.
“I’ll get calls from Singapore or Malaysia,” Jeffrey said, pointing to the international utility of LinkedIn. As one of his recommendations notes, “My company, based in Europe, uses Jeff and his firm as our primary bridge to the U.S. government.” Jeffrey’s profile enables people with PR needs to find him in Washington — and it enables him to reach out to other companies who may need representation in the nation’s capitol. Following his $250K revelation on LinkedIn, Jeffrey made it a point to expand his network to encourage incoming opportunities.
How: Jeffrey wants to be eminently discoverable on LinkedIn to encourage incoming business. He’s furnished his profile to reflect great credentials and recommendations from satisfied customers. His career covers about 25 years in Washington, and his professional summary illuminates the services Fleishman-Hillard can provide. With a robust profile, Jeffrey has an authentic platform through which he can reach out to new business opportunities.
This is a quick post to announce that we have now made additional changes to LinkedIn’s native iPhone app to optimize its performance. You may have read our earlier posts on LinkedIn Mobile as well as the native iPhone app, which we launched recently.
Here are three enhancements to LinkedIn’s Native iPhone app that will significantly improve your experience:
Faster loading for profiles and status updates
Faster list scrolling
Numerous stability and optimization fixes
Here are the five most important features you’ll be able to access on LinkedIn’s native iPhone app today:
Status: Broadcast your status to your professional network when you’re on the road
Address Book: Pull up information on any of your contacts as you travel
Search: Saving your search history and results by keywords, name, company & title
Add: Invite peers and colleagues you meet at events to LinkedIn
Research: View the public profiles of individuals you meet at conferences
What would you do if someone cold-called you to pitch a corporate buyout? Over the phone, that might be an awkward conversation. By email, it’d probably be dismissed as spam. But on the strength of an InMail via LinkedIn, The Weather Channel went on to acquire two significant vacation rental sites last year.
In June 2007, Steve Hassett received an InMail asking if The Weather Channel might be interested in acquiring LakeRentals.com and CoastRentals.com, two sites founded by web entrepreneur Brant Bukowsky of Columbia, Missouri. LinkedIn first enabled Brant to find the right person at The Weather Channel for the pitch. In return, LinkedIn then enabled Steve to surmise that the opportunity was legit. A detailed investigation followed, revealing that LakeRentals and CoastRentals had grown by 50% for six consecutive quarters.
Three months after the InMail, The Weather Channel acquired both websites. “As a result of that success,” Steve said, “I went on to rewrite my profile to make it more of a billboard for what we’re trying to do.”
How: The Weather Channel Interactive is always looking for dynamic web properties to acquire. By having a profile on LinkedIn, Steve has an official presence through which he can field incoming opportunities. Without LinkedIn, incoming opportunities might get hung up in a company phone directory or left in a dead letter box. An official profile helps people searching LinkedIn to find the right person for the right opportunity.
• Fill out a complete professional history, adding positions to represent your experience
• Add hyperlinks to the properties or websites that illustrate your accomplishments – and select “Other” from the drop down menus to give each an interesting title
Could the phrase “A penny for your thoughts” define the nascent urge of business consulting? If so, the LinkedIn Answers service presents the modern business equivalent of that phrase, and our ongoing series of successful LinkedIn users shows how this week. Where some employ the service to answer tough business questions, and others to gather quick market research, Steven Shimek uses it to showcase his expertise — and build business relationships which bring in lucrative contracts for his firm. Steven, a Senior VP at Ruder Finn Public Relations in Los Angeles, used LinkedIn first to find his current position, and then began answering questions on LinkedIn Answers. This led to multiple business developments for Ruder Finn, not the least of which was a a $250,000 contract.
A quartermillion for your thoughts? That’s the opportunity Steven found.
How: Steven replies to business questions posted on LinkedIn Answers and advocates drafting a response “in such a way that it showcases your company’s capabilities.” By posting a qualified, valuable answer to business questions, he builds relationships that often turn into business opportunities. Steven also describes LinkedIn as a “litmus test”, saying that when a company’s key players are not on LinkedIn, they’re often not serious about the business.
LinkedIn Tip from Steven
Showcase your company’s capabilities
• Search LinkedIn Jobs to find the position that best suits your talents
• Post qualified responses on LinkedIn Answers to showcase your professional expertise
• Be a resource to your friends and clients and associates, adding value to relationships that may help you
Quick Update: Check out both Dan Nye’s question on LinkedIn Answers as well as a CNBC interview he gave earlier today around the partnership. Check out Dan’s interview here.
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Today, I’d like to announce the start of our collaboration with one of the most recognized leaders in global business news – CNBC! This collaboration includes CNBC integrating LinkedIn’s community and networking functionality into CNBC.com, enabling users to share and discuss news with their professional networks.
Here are the three broad implications of the CNBC-LinkedIn collaboration for our users:
1. On LinkedIn: LinkedIn’s rapidly growing user base of over 27 million professionals now have an opportunity to both consume as well as share with their professional network, breaking business news & content from CNBC that ranges from articles and blogs to financial data and video content.
2. On CNBC.com: As a regular CNBC.com user, you’ll start seeing LinkedIn’s community and networking functionality integrated on CNBC.com (for e.g. sharing CNBC articles with your professional network on LinkedIn or finding out who in your network connects you to the companies you read about).
3. On CNBC: Community-generated content from LinkedIn will also be broadcast on CNBC programs. These include survey results and on-air Q&A with CNBC anchors, reporters and guests.
These are the three areas we’re planning for in our collaboration with CNBC in the coming months. We believe this will help our users stay on top of the latest in their field of business and more importantly, will enable them to share that information with their professional network — at the speed of business.
In the spirit of community involvement, I would like to ask you, our members, what ideas you may have for how CNBC and LinkedIn can work together to help you. Please submit your answers here.
We love to hear from you. So feel free to comment, but keep in mind the basics of blog etiquette — no spam, no profanity, no slander, etc. All comments are moderated.
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