We’re en route to introducing LinkedIn in more languages as part of our global development efforts and I’m very happy to announce that LinkedIn en Français is now a fait accompli.  Whether you use it to rendezvous online or have a tête-à-tête, LinkedIn acts as a liaison between 31M professionals worldwide and we’re adding a new user every second.

At LinkedIn our raison d’etre is to facilitate professional networking, and to help everyone from start-up entrepreneurs to international business leaders to communicate, do business, and share their knowledge. We aim to create a user experience par excellence for our global membership and a key part of this is facilitating different language profiles.

And, I thought it’d be appropriate to say a few words in Français to welcome our French users (see above video):

A tous nos membres francophones et aux amateurs de la langue de Molière, nous sommes ravis de vous accueillir sur la version française de notre site ! Notre but est de mieux vous servir et de faciliter la recherche d’informations, l’échange entre collègues et de vous aider à faire des affaires. Chez LinkedIn, nous comprenons l’importance de pouvoir communiquer en différentes langues, et nous espérons que ce bilinguisme (ou plurilinguisme, avec l’espagnol) rendra votre expérience du réseau encore meilleure. N’hésitez pas à nous donner votre avis ci-dessous!

The above video also sees a few of my colleagues join me in welcoming all our French speaking and French-loving members to our French site. After watching the video I can’t help but say: please pardon my colleagues’ French!

Jokes apart, our aim is to serve you better: to find the information you need; discuss information with your colleagues, and simply to do business. At LinkedIn, we understand well the importance of communicating in different languages to get the job done, and we hope that this multilingualism will enhance your LinkedIn experience.

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Editor’s Note: To access the French version of our site, just log into LinkedIn and access the “Language” drop down menu on the top right hand corner of the homepage header.

I am writing today to announce the full release of LinkedIn’s new search platform to over 31 million LinkedIn users.

The new search platform at LinkedIn is redefining the way professionals go about finding talent, business partners, customers or a former colleague.

Here is a video that summarizes some of the key features in the new search experience, followed by key elements of the new functionality:

Many more ways to find people

Our user’s profiles include a wealth of structured data that enables powerful search refinement options. You can refine search results by entering data in more than a dozen different fields that range from “name” and “company” to “school” and “language”.

Expanded search space

We eliminated the need to switch tabs if you want to see results with professionals from outside your network. The new search will retrieve the most relevant professionals from the entire LinkedIn community.

Relationship matters

One of the most important factors in ranking search results is the searcher’s network. This means that every matching search result is evaluated based on who is executing the search. The end result is a personalized relevance algorithm that places the professionals that are most likely to be of interest at the top of the first search results page.

Powerful productivity tools

We synthesized over a thousand pieces of feedback and analyzed data from over a billion search queries. We leveraged the research to design powerful tools to help our users be more productive when looking for the right professional. Given below is a list of key functionality that the feature launches with today:

•    “In Common” is a new field in search results that lets you find what connections and groups you share with the selected user.

•    We’ll allow you to save searches and receive reminders by email if we find that someone new meets your search criteria.

•    We now offer two views as part of the search results redesign: basic and expanded. In addition, we also let you customize your own view. You’ll be able to add or remove fields from search results based on what makes the most sense for your search.

•    We know how hard typing people’s names is. We hear it from our users and also see it in the data. As a result, we built a robust spell checker for names. We’ll expand the spell checker to other type of keywords very soon.

•    We also saw in the data that many of you use search to get to your connections quickly. In order to make it more efficient, we developed a type-ahead widget that recommends connections as you type from any people search box.

Explore LinkedIn’s New People Search

These are some of feature enhancements you’ll see rolled out over the next few days. We hope this augments your productivity and we’d love to hear your feedback, questions and suggestions.

Just a few months ago Michael Friedenberg, CEO of CXO Media asked what three qualities best describes a CIO. And, just a few weeks ago former CEO of Disney, Michael Eisner, asked the perfect follow-up question:

which CEO and/or company most successfully, consistently and thoroughly embodies innovation to maximize business results?

Almost 800 professionals answered the question. While a few answers predicted the demise of the “Star-CEO” role, the majority cited examples of CEOs such as Steve Jobs or companies like Southwest Airlines and Google.

Here’s a sampling:

Neal Lachman, Chairman & CEO at N.S. Lachman & Co.

We may have some visionary founder or executive that will occasionally play the charismatic CEO role, but the era of the CEO as the poster-child of great innovation and great leadership is gone due to the job-hopping tendencies of today’s (short-term minded) CEOs.

Patrick Hayes, Vice President, CSMG

Apple has done amazing things with computing and more recently Consumer Electronics devices. They have a unnatural ability to bring out converged platforms and extend CE devices with an obsession for the form/factor itself and more importantly the surrounding value added services and products. For example, iPod went from a product, to a platform to a full-fledged eco-system of products and services.

And, like it or not they changed the way record labels, artists, etc. view the distribution and monetization of music now. They’re doing it again with iPhone.

Browse the rest of the 777 answers here.

How to tap into the wisdom of your crowd using LinkedIn Answers:

1. Ask your Network: Need an answer in a particular area of professional expertise. LinkedIn has hundreds of categories in the professional space ranging from the mundane to the obscure.

Ask a Question on LinkedIn Answers

2. Search for Answers: Don’t have time to ask a question. Never mind. Somebody may have encountered the same issues you have, may have asked the question on LinkedIn and found a satisfactory solution to it. 

Find Answers on LinkedIn

3. Help your Network with your Answers: Want to earn some Digital Karma? Answer questions in your area of expertise that can help both your professional network as well as others looking for similar solutions.

Answer questions from your LinkedIn network

If advertising execs have been watching AMC’s “Mad Men” with a knowing eye, it’s likely because they say the show nails the period, the culture, and the industry. Advertising is a tough business that requires a deft hand at finding and managing prospects, which in turn requires maintaining great relationships. Renegade President & CEO Drew Neisser knows a thing or two about advertising, having been in the industry for, he says, “decades, so to speak.”

“LinkedIn is part of the fabric of Renegade and how we do business,” Drew tells us. His executive assistant vets appointments; HR seeks out the best talent; biz dev finds and qualifies leads, all on LinkedIn. Drew even proposes LinkedIn to clients as a resource for reaching targeted niches. But most importantly, LinkedIn helps Drew stay connected with decades of clients while developing new ones.

Drew had to move on to his next meeting, a client that remembered Renegade from nine years ago. They had reconnected on LinkedIn. “That shows you the power of staying connected with people — it’s a long-term game.”

LinkedIn User Snapshot

Who: Drew Neisser, President & CEO, Renegade (New York, NY)

How: Drew needs to maintain relationships with decades of clients and former colleagues, as well as reach out to new business opportunities.

LinkedIn Tip from Drew

Cold calls are dead – know enough about someone to have a warm conversation:

• Research every contact before you reach out to them with LinkedIn’s next-gen Search
• Upload your address book to reconnect with colleagues and clients
• Maintain a robust profile to help old contacts find you and new contacts vet you

Check out the Learning Center to learn more about using LinkedIn

Since the launch of the Spanish language version of LinkedIn, we’ve had one consistent request from our multilingual users – how can I create a Spanish profile as well?

After all, if you’re a professional in today’s global world, your network may extend well beyond the borders of your home country. And if a Spanish-speaking contact comes to view your profile via the Spanish version of LinkedIn, shouldn’t they be viewing your profile in Spanish as well?

We, of course, thought this was a great idea. So today we’re rolled out the ability to translate your existing LinkedIn profile into any of 41 languages.

Once translated, your original profile remains unchanged, but members that prefer to use or search LinkedIn in a different language will see the translated version instead. So if you create a Spanish profile via the steps below, LinkedIn members using the site in Spanish will see your Spanish profile instead of your English one.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Creating Your LinkedIn Profile in a Different Language

Creating a translated version of your profile in a desired language is easy. Just click on the “Profile” link in the left hand side navigation and go to your “Edit My Profile” page.

On this page, click the “Create your profile in another language” link on the right hand side.

2. Beginning to Translate Your New Profile

After clicking the link above, you’ll be given the chance to kick-start the translation process by choosing the language into which you are translating and proving a translated first name, last name, and professional “headline”. Throughout the translation process we will show the content on your original (or as we call it, primary) profile to guide you in your work (it’s in blue below).

Once you complete the initial translation step above, you will be brought to the “Edit My Profile” page for the language into which you are translating your profile.

This page is just like the normal “Edit My Profile” page but is now editing the translated version of your profile in the language that you’ve chosen. Note that you can always return to this page (or find the “Edit My Profile” page for any language in which you’ve created a profile) by using the drop down in the upper right hand corner of the page.

3. Completing the Translation

You’ll notice that to keep things simple, many of the elements of your profile are shared across all of your profile languages and versions. If you add a position, for example, it will appear on your profile for all languages.

However, from the “Edit My Profile” page for the desired language, you can always click on any of the “Edit” links to adjust how that position, education or other piece of information appears in the language of your choice.

On all such resulting edit pages, we will always show you content from your original/primary profile (in blue) to guide your adjustments & translation. These pages will also show you the full list of languages in which you have profiles (and where similar adjustments may be needed) on the right hand side of the page.

4. How Others Will View Your Profile

As usual, throughout your editing/translating process, you can always review how others will see your profile by clicking on the “View My Profile” tab. We’ve added the profile language drop down to the right hand corner of this page as well, so that you can always review your profile in all the languages into which you’ve translated it.

Starting today, LinkedIn members that use the site in Spanish will typically see the Spanish version of your profile on LinkedIn. And as LinkedIn continues to move into other languages & markets, the correct translation of your profile will be shown to members using or searching the site in those other languages.

LinkedIn’s new Search experience will also allow members to find profiles in a particular language.

5. Now Tell Us What You Think

We’re still very early in adjusting LinkedIn for the needs of our multilingual and multinational professionals. So whether you find this feature useful or not, please let us know by leaving a comment on this post or clicking on the “Help Improve LinkedIn” link at the bottom of any page on the site.

Now, edit your LinkedIn profile in different languages

Fundamentally, the Internet is about connecting people to information. Every business needs to connect with partners, customers and potential recruits to succeed. Starting this Thursday, we’ve made portions of our company profiles accessible to search engines–this way, when you search for ‘Houston medical device companies’ or ‘Open Geophysical’, you’ll now find information at your fingertips with LinkedIn company profiles in your search results.

Technically, it’s pretty simple:

•    Allow anonymous access to our company profiles
•    Provide friendly URLs, e.g.: http://www.linkedin.com/companies/paypal

As a regular LinkedIn user, when you follow any link to a company, you will see the usual company profile page, customized for you.  For anonymous access (anyone who is not signed in) we changed the layout a bit.

Take a look: Amazon, NVIDIA, Intel (make sure you’re signed out).

We’ve got over 160,000 company profiles, which anyone can now link to, find in web search results (google: eBay), run through a translator (Yahoo! in German), etc..  These company public profiles are densely linked both with each other and with our member public profiles, making for a pretty substantial web of publicly available data.

Check out our directory of companies to make sure your company’s profile is up-to-date. If we don’t have a profile for your company, add it here.

Send us your feedback and any ideas you have for how we can help companies better express themselves.

Since we announced Company Profiles, we’ve received tons of requests from LinkedIn users requesting to create a profile for their company.  Now you can. Company Profiles are an important research and marketing tool for your business that can help potential customers, clients and employees learn more about your company and the people who work there.

Here’s how to create a profile for your company

Step 1: Enter your company name and your email address. This ensures that you are a current employee of this company and that your company doesn’t already have a profile.

Step 2: Once your email has been verified, you can provide basic information about your company.

Step 3: Now when you have a skeleton of your company profile it’s time to provide more data about your company. Add location and related companies. Spice it up with logo. Editing a company profile is as easy as the above 2 steps. What’s better is that your colleagues from the company can also edit the information once they’re identified as belonging to a specific company group.

Our resident genius developed pretty amazing algorithms and we’ll be able to add interesting and unique stats data as soon as more people will be connected to this company.

So, what are you waiting for? Check out your company profile on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/companies). And if you can’t find your company profile, add it here.

Add your own Company’s profile on LinkedIn

See also:

Introducing Company Directory & Search

Here’s a LinkedIn user best practice to end the week with. You’ve probably seen a lot of our past users describe their Aha moments – whether it be finding a $1M client or creating an “accidental” global enterprise – but millions of other users find their Aha moments through simple mutual introductions that LinkedIn affords on a daily basis.

This week, we shine the spotlight on Mark Kvamme (partner at Sequoia capital, one of LinkedIn’s early institutional investors), who’s also on LinkedIn’s board of directors. Mark talks of his original Aha moment on LinkedIn – finding and connecting with Ross Levinsohn through a mutual connection, Marc Andreessen.

Also, the biggest priority (and, challenge) for entrepreneurs is finding the right talent for their companies. LinkedIn can be a boon for start ups since it enables you to find the right candidates to lead various disciplines in your company through the power of a mutual introduction.

2 Quick Tips from Mark Kvamme

1. How to ask for a mutual introduction on LinkedIn

1. Go to the profile of Person A
2. Click “Send a message”
3. Click the link “Include others on this message”
4. Type in the name of Person B
5. Write my message

Learn more here

Find the right candidates in your Address book

2. How to search like a Pro on LinkedIn

1. Jump right into advanced search
2. The Magic of Boolean Search: AND, OR, NOT
3. Leverage the sorting functions

Learn more here

Search like a Pro on LinkedIn

A couple of months ago, we announced the ability for groups to have discussions on LinkedIn.  LinkedIn is now hosting hundreds of thousands of interesting discussions. We continue to build on the promise of allowing a richer experience within groups this week by launching a feature that allows you to share and discuss news articles within LinkedIn groups.

To share a news article with your LinkedIn Groups, click on “Submit a new article” and enter the URL you would like to share.

After submitting the article you will land on a discussion page that we have for the group to talk about what you just shared.

Stay tuned to more features that will help you make it easier to share articles with your group in the coming months.

Additionally, blog and other publishers can add the share badge to their site to encourage sharing with groups.  To get information on how to do this, please visit our widgets page.

Share News articles within your LinkedIn Groups

ABCNews.com columnist Michelle Goodman wrote an article called, “A Luddite’s Guide to LinkedIn: Eight Tips on How to Use Professional Web Sites to Find Your Next Job.” The piece talks about the importance of using a professional site like LinkedIn to find your next job (even if you aren’t currently looking/on the market for a new job).

The eight tips that Michelle mentions in her article are: 1. Boost Your Profile’s SEO, 2. Broadcast Your News, 3. Join a Group, 4. Ask and Answer Questions, 5. Find Companies to Work for and Rising Stars to Emulate, 6. Give and Get Recommendations, 7. Make Contacts Judiciously, and 8. Don’t Wait Till You Lose Your Job.

Her single piece of advice for job hunters:

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: Join LinkedIn now, even if you have a job to go to every week. If you get laid off, you’ll be glad you don’t have to scramble to piece together an entire network of professionals willing to go to bat for you.

The piece also links to our VP of Marketing and Advertising, Patrick Crane’s ABC7 video interview that was filmed awhile back.

LinkedIn Tips for the Job Hunter:

1. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find or fill that next job using the power of your network.

• Job seekers can utilize inside connections at potential employers to help land their dream job.
• Hiring managers can tap into a network of over 20 million professionals to find the ideal candidate with the specific skill set and experience needed.

Check out LinkedIn Jobs

2. The right person, talent, or knowledge you’re looking for is already on LinkedIn. Use search to find what you need to be more effective professionally:

• Search by name and other distinguishing characteristics to quickly locate the person you are looking for.
• Use the advanced search to target specific skill sets or find subject-matter experts.
• Conduct reference searches on potential job candidates and business partners.

Find who you’re looking for on LinkedIn’s Advanced Search