Linkedin grows in importance.

Wasn't it just a few months ago that Linkedin was the social media system everyone swore you had to be on, but you weren't really sure why?  It's an online resume, right? I'd tell people it was the 2011 version of your "little black book", the kind we used to keep our best, most reliable contact information in. Linkedin is growing in popularity, now it's grown  considerably to be more than just that.

On May 19th, Linkedin went public.  They must've had some new ideas waiting all warm in the pot because since mid March they've added new features that are very useful.  These features make using Linkedin more compelling than it was when it served as just an online resume.  I've grown to like the Advanced Search and the Linkedin Today News feeds.  Advanced Search is now very robust.  You can search for people by Industry, Groups, Relationship, Language, Job Function, and Company Size.  You can really drill down to locate experts and potential employees with the People Search tool. For our franchisees, it's help at their fingertips. Without having a tremendous amount of "connections" (friends or followers in Linkedin-speak) you can still gleen fantastic information from others if you share similar groups with them.  Advanced Search lets you look not only for people, but for Updates, Jobs, Companies, Answers and Groups.  Look for keywords in the answers that others have contributed to the groups or communities they've joined.  It works very well.

The Linkedin Today News feeds are even better in my opinion! You now have a Linkedin Today bar at the top of your Home page.  It contains news and postings from industries and subject matter that you've subscribed or shown interest in.  You select which subjects or sources you'd like to receive information regarding and Linkedin delivers content as recommended by other users with similar interests.  Each user that recommends a link or article shows up in a counter in the lower left corner of each article.  If you read an article you like, you can reach out and "connect" with many of the folks that also thought enough to post this article. It's very effective, and for me it has spurred me to post things I think are of interest that I don't think others have seen yet. To the readers that share my interests, sources and groups, I come across as informed and knowledgeable on these subjects. This allows me to potentially "link" to others for answers and to have them reply to my questions.  Always professional in nature, it puts the power of the Linkedin community to work on my issues. That I like. I'm guessing we'll see more improvements to Linkedin before 2012.  They've added job change features and other hiring/HR tools...  pretty neat for a free system!