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News Corp In Talks with LinkedIn

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new media newsAnother major acquisition is brewing! TechCrunch has an unconfirmed rumor that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is eyeing the fast growing professional networking site LinkedIn.

Here are some points why News Corp is interested with LinkedIn:

  1. LinkedIn’s strong association with mature professionals complements News Corp’s premier advertising properties aimed at the same market such as Wall Street Journal, The Times, and Sunday Times. Hopefully, this could offset the declining advertising in the newspapers.
  2. LinkedIn’s strong base of 16 million users worldwide, robust growth, and consistent profitablility.
  3. Mature professionals with dry sense of humor do not appreciate its “wackiness” of Facebook. In short, Facebook is more expensive

If the acquisition happens, will News Corp rename it to MyLinkedIn? Just wondering…

Originally posted on November 22, 2007 @ 11:33 am

10 practical tips to boost your LinkedIn profile

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new media newsHaving a LinkedIn profile is quickly becoming a necessity among job seekers for many headhunters and HR representatives are turning to social networks to get the best candidates.

However, it is not enough to create a simple profile and hope that companies will check your account. With more than 14 million members, you need to be aggressive and proactive to catch the eyes of potential employers. The key, my friend, is personal branding.

Fortunately, LinkedIn is offering 10 tips to improve your personal profile:

  1. Don’t just cut and paste your resume. Instead, describe your experience and abilities as you would to someone you just met. And write for the screen, in short blocks of copy with visual or textual signposts.
  2. Use specific adjectives, colorful verbs, active construction (“managed project team,” not “responsible for project team management”).
  3. Write a personal tagline. That line of text under your name? It’s the first thing people see in your profile. It follows your name in search hit lists. It’s your brand.
  4. Write a 30-second description, the essence of who you are and what you do, and use it in the Summary section to engage readers. You’ve got 5-10 seconds to capture their attention.
  5. Point out your skills. Also: particular abilities and interests, the personal values you bring to your professional performance, even a note of humor or passion.
  6. Explain your experience. Help the reader grasp the key points: briefly say what the company does and what you did or do for them.
  7. Add websites that showcase your abilities or passions. Then edit the default “My Website” label to encourage click-throughs (you get Google page rankings for those, raising your visibility).
  8. Make a point of answering questions in your field, to establish your expertise, raise your visibility, and most important, to build social capital with people in your network.
  9. Get recommendations from colleagues, clients, and employers who can speak credibly about your abilities or performance. (Think quality, not quantity.)
  10. Build your connections. Connections are one of the most important aspects of your brand: the company you keep reflects the quality of your brand.

Originally posted on November 19, 2007 @ 1:43 pm

LinkedIn to open their platform to developers?

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No confirmations yet as of this writing, but the idea of LinkedIn opening up their platform to developers is not far from happening.

With Facebook enabling developers to create applications for their network a month ago, LinkedIn is expected to follow suit. Yup, you got it right. Facebook and LinkedIn — an unlikely competition to watch out for. Vallywag has already commented on this, anticipating a battle between the two networking giants:

On the surface, the two couldn’t be any more different: Mark Zuckerberg’s social network has only recently expanded beyond college students; and Linked In is a tool for recruiters, job seekers, sales execs and other corporate drones. But Facebook’s interface is sufficiently clean, and efficient, that it’s attracting a new class of user, the professional.

True enough, the LinkedIn VS Facebook battle is looming in the horizon. (Or, has it already began?)

With about 11 million members to date, increasing with 180,000 new members each week, Dan Nye, LinkedIn’s CEO, is confident that LinkedIn will own the business networking. He said, “people will most likely have a social network for personal purposes, and another for professional and business-related connections. After the inevitable social net shakeout, Facebook and MySpace will remain standing and will compete to supply an outlet for personal self-expression and community. Meanwhile, LinkedIn will dominate the business of business networking — serving as a productivity tool used for professional reference checking, recruiting, and to get expert advice.”

But what if you can have both your personal and business contacts all in one platform? Interestingly, more and more professionals now are using Facebook to invite business contacts and create professional networks — a territory that supposedly has LinkedIn’s name on it. And with more possible developments being considered to upgrade Facebook’s platform, the logical thing for LinkedIn to do is to open up to new development strategies as well and catch up.

Two things that could happen in the next few weeks, or months: (1) LinkedIn to deploy itself as an application on Facebook; or (2) The two networks to take on the virtual battle. Let’s wait and see.

Originally posted on June 26, 2007 @ 5:20 am