July 5, 2008

LinkedIn: It's Much More Powerful Than You Think

I've been using Facebook - well passively using it - to keep track of people in business and of a more personal nature. LinkedIn hasn't really got me excited. I guess since there's no photos and it's more of a place to post your resume, and connect with people (actively) it wasn't a service for me to use personally. Also more people connect with me on Facebook than on LinkedIn or Plaxo for that matter. I am getting more invites from Hi5 as well.

However, in reading a story from the New York Times I realize that LinkedIn is quite a powerful tool for business - in more ways than I knew. Many companies are using it as a private Intranet of sorts to enable their employees to communicate with one other. While email is great for one to one communication email does not enable you to harness the intelligence and knowledge of your dispersed employees.

If you want to find the one person in your 39 person company who knows about doing business in Accra, Ghana - how can you do that? Unless you personally know someone or hear it via word of mouth, it's hard.

Using a service liked LinkedIn, you can do this. The other aspect of using LinkedIn, is for its main feature of connecting people. If everyone in your company uploads their email addresses the connections your company has as a group goes up drastically.

Read the full article here, in the NY Times.

tags: facebook , jigsaw , linkedin , social media | 0 comments