Linkedin Blog

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.

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.

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.

[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.