As a company that’s based on the mantra “Relationships Matter”; we want to make it easier than ever for you to find, organize and stay in touch with your business connections. Over the next few weeks, you will start seeing improvements to your LinkedIn address book that will help you be more productive. Feature details after the jump.

Browse and find your connections more easily

The most noticeable update is a new browse panel that allows you to browse your connections by their current companies, locations and industries. In addition, you can search your connections by entering their first name, last name or current company in the search box above the browse panel.

You can also browse your new connections and your connections who may have recently added a new connection by using the Recent Activity filter in the browse panel.

Mini-profiles and up-to-date contact information

View mini-profiles of your connections to see if they have changed their current positions, added any new connections or send them a message through a third column on the right.

You can look up contact information like phone numbers, email addresses and physical mailing addresses. You can also add this information yourself by editing the contact information of connections in your address book.

This new look offers the following additional features:

• Connections automatically tagged with keywords such as “colleagues”, “friends”, “partners” and “group members” based on information you provide when inviting them to connect with you
• Organize your connections into different groups via tags
• Send a message to multiple connections at once based on how you’ve organized them by tags

We look forward to hearing your feedback on these enhancements as we optimize their user experience. Note that these enhancements are currently in beta and you can opt-out of them during the trial period. Check out LinkedIn’s newly redesigned address book here.

Since September of 2008, LinkedIn members have earned over $1 million by participating in targeted research surveys on professional topics. Over 100,000 members from more than 85 countries have shared their experience and opinions on topics spanning from cloud computing to healthcare reform to real estate through these research surveys. LinkedIn Surveys enables members to share their valuable experience, help shape important business decisions, while also earning a reward for contributing their opinions.

Members who qualify and complete a survey can receive an honorarium between $5 and $100, which they can select from a variety of options such as Amazon e-certificates, Paypal transfers, Starbucks cards, books, song downloads, or donations to global charities. Over the past year, LinkedIn members have donated over $150,000 of their rewards to charities like Doctors without Borders and the International Red Cross. Here are thoughts from one of our users, Warren Sypteras:

“I was sent an invitation to do a survey  from LinkedIn.  I normally hate doing these things because I spend my time giving data for free.  Ergo;  the surveyors only benefit.  I was surprised to find that LinkedIn actually DO value the opinions they get.  Thanks!”

Launched late last year, LinkedIn Surveys allows business professionals, market researchers, consultants, or investors to gain market insights from targeted professional audiences around the globe.

Participation in research studies is by invitation only and members are selected based on their profile information and relevance of their expertise to the research topic. You can improve your chances of participation by making sure your profile is complete and up-to-date.

Here at LinkedIn, we believe that people search is one of the most valuable new areas of search technology. Late last year, we announced the launch of the new people search platform, rebuilt from the ground up. Since that launch, I’m happy to report that the enhancements have resulted in nearly doubling overall search activity on LinkedIn. Thanks for tons of great feedback you provided since we launched that has helped spur these numerous improvements.

Today, I am excited to announce the release of another huge improvement to LinkedIn’s People Search experience: “Faceted Search”.

“Faceted Search” offers dynamic filters that are automatically generated based on your actual query results. These filters let you quickly and easily hone your query over 50 million LinkedIn profiles based on 8 facets: current company, past company, location, relationship, location, industry, school, and profile languages.

A new module titled “Refine By” will include a list of the most relevant facets, based on the actual results of your original query.

The filters are generated in real time for every query by parsing all matching results and extracting the most important attributes. We then present those to you in an intuitive interface that lets you select one or multiple filters per facet. You can refine, expand or stumble upon insightful information by simply clicking on the search options that matter to you.

Faceted Search offers the following benefits to your search experience on LinkedIn:

• Enables True Guided Navigation: A list of filters are generated dynamically for every search in order to guide you through the optimal path to find the most relevant people

• Provides Intuitive Interface: Refining your search is easier than ever with an intuitive user interface that allows you to slice and dice search results by 8 facets

• Improves Precision: As LinkedIn continues to grow by the millions, increasing search space requires increased precision to help you find exactly the right people

• Increases Efficiency: Find talent, business partners, customers or a former colleague faster than ever before.

• Reduces Need for Complex Queries: It significantly reduces the need for complex Boolean queries. This was a particular need we heard from many of our power users.

Here is a quick video that highlights the key elements of Faceted Search:

We believe these improvements will help augment your productivity and we’d love to hear your feedback, questions and suggestions.

Last week LinkedIn launched a significant integration with Twitter, enabling professionals to expand their personal brands to their professional networks and vice-versa. To show our users how that might work, today we’re asking you: What’s the best business advice you’ve ever received?

The best business advice I ever received seemed to be something of an oxymoron. As an entrepreneur, you’re told frequently, “Be persistent! Follow your vision! Flatten obstacles!” But on the other hand, you’re urged to “Learn from the market! Adapt to changing conditions! Take a different course!” Knowing when to persist and when to be flexible is more of an art than a science. So in a fluid, fast-changing world, sometimes you stick to your vision, and sometimes you adapt quickly.

Unfortunately, that’s more than 140 characters! So watch the video to see how Biz and I resolve our best advice to the unique Twitter format. And tweet your best advice today with #in.

Here’s how you can share the best business advice you’ve received on LinkedIn and Twitter

1. LinkedIn and Twitter users can participate by tweeting the best business advice they’ve received with the hashtag #in.
2. If you’ve already linked your accounts, this hashtag will automatically update your LinkedIn status, enabling you to share your wisdom with both networks simultaneously.

As you’ve likely heard by now, we launched our first Twitter integration features at LinkedIn earlier this week.  For professionals who want to make Twitter part of their professional identity, you can now easily add your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile, and seamlessly post LinkedIn status updates to Twitter, and vice-versa.

This launch also brings with it a brand new addition to the LinkedIn application platform: Tweets.

Tweets is an application that allows you to seamless integrate basic Twitter functionality into your LinkedIn experience.  For our users who are regular users of Twitter, Tweets provides the following:

• Twitter client functionality, right from your LinkedIn homepage. Tweets adds a module to your homepage that allows you to easily see the most recent tweets of the people you follow on Twitter.  You can also easily reply to each tweet, or retweet it. Better still, you can even share it with your LinkedIn connections.

• Add your recent tweets to your LinkedIn profile. Tweets adds a module to your profile that shows your Twitter account and most recent tweets with a rich, compelling presentation.  You can easily choose to either display your most recent tweets, or only those tweets which feature the #in or #li hashtags.

• Easily browse the tweets of people you follow. Once you click through into the Tweets application, you can easily click on any Twitter user name, and view the most recent tweets of that user.

Next week, we’ll be adding Tweets to the Application directory on LinkedIn.  For the time being, if you’re interested in giving Tweets a try, here is the link to the Tweets installation page.  It’s also available from the “Add Application” menu on the homepage.

Tweets joins its sibling application, Company Buzz, the most popular application to date on the LinkedIn platform.  Company Buzz makes it simple for professionals to easily keep track of what people are saying about their company, products, competitors, and partners in real time by monitoring saved Twitter searches.  Together, they are a powerful set of tools for professionals to make monitoring Twitter a part of their LinkedIn routine.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be adding additional functionality to Tweets to make it as easy as possible for LinkedIn members to find and follow people on Twitter.  We hope you enjoy this new addition to the LinkedIn application platform.

I often come across interesting profiles on LinkedIn, but I’ve found it challenging to save profiles so I can easily come back to them later. Usually, I resort to bookmarking the profiles in my web browser or scribbling down names on a piece of paper.

Today we are launching Profile Organizer, a new Premium feature that lets you save profiles, organize them into folders, and add notes. Anytime you find an interesting profile, simply click “Save Profile” and the profile is bookmarked for you within LinkedIn.

When you click “Save Profile”, the profile is added to your Profile Organizer. You now see a module on the profile page from which you can save a profile into a designated folder, add contact information, and private notes that are visible only to you.  It’s a great way to remember relevant details about contacts, and develop your relationships.

The Profile Organizer is a workspace accessible through the Contacts tab, where you can manage all of your saved profiles organized into specific folders.

Profile Organizer also lets you save profiles directly from the search results page. With just one click, you can save a profile and add it to a folder directly from search.

If you do many searches on LinkedIn, the single-click “save profile” action can save you time. You no longer need to review each interesting profile in detail: just save from the search results page, and you can narrow down your list in Profile Organizer later.

A few of us at LinkedIn have started using Profile Organizer and find it particularly helpful after attending networking events or conferences.  In the past, I collected a stack of business cards and came back from the event unsure about what to do with them. Now, I find the contacts on LinkedIn, and jot down relevant information into Profile Organizer. The next time I go to a similar event, I simply glance through my notes to recall details about our past conversations.

If you have a minute, check out this short feature demo:

Get started using the new feature by clicking on the “Save Profile” link from any LinkedIn profile or search results. Alternatively, you can also check out your Profile Organizer page here.

Profile Organizer is a Premium Account feature, but we are offering a 30-day free trial for all of our members to try it out. Learn more here. We’d love to hear your questions and / or feedback at feedback@linkedin.com. Or follow us @linkedin.

This is part of our success story series where LinkedIn users share their best practices on using LinkedIn more effectively to advance their career or business. Today’s user story comes from Thomas Merlino, small business owner at InControl Technical, who discovered how LinkedIn could help his small business grow outside of where he lived.

How I used LinkedIn as a beginner

Never underestimate the power of social networking.  When I first signed up for a LinkedIn account, it was primarily to network with peers in my area.  I am now a small business owner who utilizes LinkedIn as a means to help gain customers outside of our local geographical area.

My business, InControl Technical, was started in February 2007.  My vision was to provide simple and straightforward technical services to the area where I live, work, and play.  I wanted to connect with other professionals and business owners in the local Erie, Pennsylvania area, so I decided to create and administer a group on LinkedIn called LinkedErie.  I, along with some others in the group, promote our individual businesses and discuss everything from politics to the local economy on the LinkedErie discussion board.  It has been a tremendous help to get to know some of my current and potential customers through this group on LinkedIn.

My Aha! moment: How a future client found me on LinkedIn

Soon the time came when I realized another advantageous benefit of social networking and LinkedIn.  While I was working towards building a sizable local customer base and getting our name out there, InControl Technical was contacted by a company out of Greenville, South Carolina.  They found us on the Web by doing a search for “computer repair erie pa” and found my LinkedIn profile that I link to from our Web site.  After viewing my credentials and seeing the recommendations on my LinkedIn profile, the company felt that InControl Technical would be a good fit for their clients in Erie, PA.  The company that contacted us installs and services equipment that is tied in with local servers at various law enforcement agencies.  Based on the recommendations and credentials posted on my LinkedIn profile and the pricing information that is readily available on our Web site, this company felt comfortable trusting us to service their installed server equipment at a reasonable cost.

Since then, we’ve received calls from other companies outside of our immediate area wanting to utilize our services to assist with everything from temporary small projects to dedicated ongoing support for field employees who don’t have access to a corporate information services department.  Without the enormous power and potential of social networking and LinkedIn, I truly believe that the task of expanding outside of invisible geographical walls would be much more difficult to accomplish.
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[LinkedIn Tip] Optimize your LinkedIn profile with appropriate keywords to be found easily by clients

I’m sure many of you reading this post may wonder how you can reap similar benefits by optimizing your LinkedIn profile for keywords pertaining to your consultancy (both for freelancers or small businesses). For starters, make sure your LinkedIn profile is up-to-date with the latest information on your small business offerings.

For example. Not only is Thomas’ profile summary up-to-date, but he’s also updated the “Specialties” section with a list of keywords related to the technical consulting offered by his small business. You may notice that the keywords he’s added are also localized mentioning Erie, Pennsylvania. This is a great way to come up in search results when prospective clients search for vendors in that particular location. In this particular example Thomas’ profile showed up when the prospective client searched for “computer repair erie pa” and found 14 results, the first of which was Thomas’s profile.

If you’re looking for vendors, don’t stop with basic search. Try advanced people search that allows you to slice and dice across multiple facets including location, industry; even groups that you belong to.

Update your LinkedIn Profile Summary and Specialties now

Kathy Robinson runs TurningPoint Career Consulting, working with mid- to executive-level job seekers who need help marketing their talents, finding interesting opportunities, and getting results in their job search. As a former HR executive, she’s seen the way that LinkedIn has changed the entire process of recruiting, for good. Read more success stories from our users here.

As a career coach, LinkedIn has proven to be a killer app for job seekers whom I counsel, with its immediate access to contacts, groups, events, and thought leaders.

The first thing I ask clients do is optimize their profile, then connect to as many relevant connections as they can, even if they’ve only worked with a former colleague briefly but have a trusted relationship. Other tips? Participate in groups.  Don’t just connect “to” people, but connect “with” people, letting them know what you’re looking for and turning a LinkedIn invitation into a longer conversation.

That’s the approach that worked for one of my clients Christine Midwood, a talented technology program director and product manager. In addition to networking with most of her real world professional connections on LinkedIn, and joining groups, she researched LinkedIn for company information and potential connections before applying for any jobs. She saw a dramatic difference in how many phone interviews or offers she got from traditional online boards (5% response rate) versus online and offline networking (31% response rate). During her search, she made a weekly goal of 3 meetings with her connections, to learn what might be happening in the job market. When she saw a job posting for what is now her current job, she looked up and connected to a former coworker through LinkedIn, who introduced her to the hiring manager. (connect with your former colleagues here)

As Christine found, LinkedIn’s power goes way beyond a profile and some contacts. For example, if you’re interested to know how people broke into a certain field? Look up their backgrounds on their profiles, and find out “how they did it”.

I can’t imagine the job search process for my clients today without the power of LinkedIn, can you? Share your experience in the comments below.

Have a LinkedIn experience you’d like to share with us? Submit your story here.

Whether or not we realize it, we all live and work in a networked world.  Reputations matter.  Relationships matter.  Information is bombarding us from a rapidly swelling variety of sources, with increasing frequency and variability in terms of quality.  Interestingly, people are managing this incredible increase in complexity with habits and business practices that date back decades, if not centuries.

They consider the source.  They consider the context.

Fortunately, in the 21st century, with the birth of the social web, we have tools at our disposal that are orders of magnitude more powerful than we have ever had as individuals or as a society.  To quote David Weinberger from his recent talk at PDF09, Transparency is the New Objectivity:

What we used to believe because we thought the author was objective we now believe because we can see through the author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position. Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.

This change is, well, epochal.

David is talking about journalism, but his insights are at the heart of why LinkedIn is such a powerful concept.  On LinkedIn, the skills that you’ve spent your career obtaining, the experience that you’ve earned, the trusted relationships that you’ve formed – they are all made largely transparent.  Your professional reputation and relationships matter – and not just to you.  That value extends far beyond your profile itself – it carries over to every interaction, every message, and every piece of contributed content.

LinkedIn Recommendations are a great example.

Most people who have applied to higher level educational institutions are familiar with the traditional methods of gathering recommendations.  Finding an advisor, mentor, or teacher willing to fill out a series of questions and write a sealed letter of recommendation.

LinkedIn Recommendations bring liquidity and transparency to the reputation economy.  As a result, the way people evaluate and respond to recommendations is changing as well.

Jeremiah Owyang wrote a post recently about a decision he has made to temporarily stop giving recommendations on LinkedIn.  In his post, he flags a number of concerns he has heard about recommendations and their relative value.  The comments on his post, and the responses on Twitter were interesting enough that it seems worthwhile to capture five of the insights about LinkedIn recommendations I gleaned here:

1. Reputation matters. On LinkedIn, your profile and reputation is tied to every recommendation you make.  As  a result, people can and do consider the source.  Having someone say you are a Web 2.0 visionary is fine and dandy, but those exact words coming from Jeremiah Owyang means something different.
2. Transparency matters. It’s trivial to see how many recommendations a person has given, and whether they tend to write the same things about everyone.  It’s also fairly trivial to see the relationship between the person being recommended and the source.
3. Content matters. Which recommendations a person publishes is up to the individual.  As a result, you won’t find “negative recommendations” (isn’t that an oxymoron?) on the site, any more that you would expect a person giving references for a job to give you people who think poorly of them.  However, recommendations speak volumes in terms of what they do and don’t say. Check out this recommendation for Peter Thiel from Reid Hoffman:



Detailed characteristics, specific achievements, highly credible and relevant source.  That’s what you want to see.

4. Recommendations are often mutual. Is this really a surprise?  Most productive, informed positive professional relationships are mutual.  As a result, most people will, in fact, leave recommendations for each other.  The fact that you’re own reputation is tied to any recommendation you write is an incredibly significant incentive to keep words honest and defensible.
5. Requesting recommendations is normal. Think about this for a second.  Who are the people you most value professionally?  Do they know it?  More importantly, do others know?  In a perfect world, we would all proactively make sure that the people who have earned our trust and respect knew it, and that others knew it as well.  But we’re all busy, and the task rarely feels urgent.  That’s why, for literally centuries, most recommendations have been requested rather than spontaneously given.

As food for thought, let me challenge you to consider the following:

In this economy, more than ever people are realizing that the most important assets they have are the skills and experiences they have earned, and the trusted relationships they have formed.  As I mentioned above, we all know great people who deserve our public recognition.  They deserve the benefit of our hard-earned reputations, applied to endorse theirs.

So I ask each of you to take the time to select three of your connections who fit this description, and write them a LinkedIn recommendation, unsolicited.

My guess is that not only will the experience be rewarding for them, but it will also significantly rewarding for you.

This is part of our success story series where users share their tips and tricks on using LinkedIn more effectively. Today’s user experience story comes from Divya Gugnani, a venture capitalist and principal at First Mark Capital who provides companies with strategic and operational guidance to achieve their visions. Read more on one of her more recent sponsorship deals she closed, with the help of a LinkedIn connection.

I’m a LinkedIn evangelist, and as a startup CEO, I’ve become an even bigger fan. I love all things social media and happily ride the Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Yahoo! Buzz wave. What makes LinkedIn different and incredibly helpful is the instant access to my professional network with an easy to use interface. As a former venture capitalist I used LinkedIn to source deals, check references for management, and connect with entrepreneurs. Today I run a media company in the culinary space, Behind the Burner, where we leverage a network of over 250 culinary experts to package their best tips, tricks and techniques in the form of short videos, articles and blogs. We also offer tools and ingredients the experts recommend at a discount. We actively virally market our food and beverage tips learned Behind the Burner and I take this same sharing approach on LinkedIn.

I’ve networked and participated in various entrepreneur, startup, food and wine enthusiast groups on the site, from ONEKO Internet Entrepreneurs to Slow Food to Food Service Professionals Network. People regularly send me inMail for culinary how-tos, restaurant insights, small business questions and entrepreneurial advice. Sometimes these interactions result in new business relationships.

Last month, Michael Gross (CEO of AJ Madison) one of the country’s largest e-commerce appliance retailers, reached out to partner with us on one Behind the Burner’s video segments through LinkedIn. He wanted to further market his appliance brand and we were considering doing a piece on summer grilling, and so we made a deal. They sponsored the segment and offered a e-commerce deal so our members can enjoy free shipping on appliances through Labor Day and as a result, they got a great professional, widely syndicated video segment highlighting their high end outdoor grills and how to use them.

I also use LinkedIn to generate buzz about my new business and keep my personal and professional network up-to-speed on my culinary happenings. Adding my profile link in outgoing emails adds credibility and the extra qualification nudge with certain requests. Your LinkedIn profile is like a mini resume, that snapshots your skills, experience and offerings and I like being able to subtly sell my expertise, as well as investigate other people’s potential by reviewing their profiles. This has been great resource for recruiting new talent, including writers, videographers, graphic designers and interns.