linkedin

LinkedIn nurtures professional relationships with Contacts app

LinkedIn is playing personal assistant with the release of Contacts, an automated contact management service for desktop and iPhone arriving Thursday in limited release.

Contacts gives members of the professional social network a way to bring together their contacts spread across address books, email accounts, and calendar apps. The service, which comes with a companion iPhone application, also hooks into LinkedIn's desktop experience and adds a relationship module to member profiles that includes recent conversations, meetings, and personal notes.

Contacts is the first LinkedIn product to launch simultaneously on desktop and mobile, and offers members a smarter way to … Read more

LinkedIn reinvents mobile apps for daily consumption

LinkedIn today released completely overhauled versions of its applications for iPhone and Android as part of an ongoing effort to make its social network for professionals a rich, daily destination for consuming content and connecting with others.

The fresh applications, which bear little resemblance to their former versions, sport a colorful and crisp design, a reworked navigation, and personalization features all intended to make LinkedIn for iPhone or Android a vehicle for rabid consumption. The iPhone and Android apps are also now available in 15 different languages.

The underlying design principle behind the new mobile apps is that everything you … Read more

LinkedIn adds mentions, looks to strike up conversations

Mentions, a conversational feature popularized by Twitter, is making its way over to the more professional venue that is LinkedIn.

The company said today that it is adding mentions for English-speaking members to stimulate more activity on the business-centric site.

Members can now mention each other by typing a connection or company name, no symbol required, in the status update box or in the comments filed on the home page, as pictured below. Those being mentioned in a post will receive a notification about the event.

"With content sharing and engagement at all-time highs, including original contributions from the … Read more

LinkedIn unifies search to push people to content

LinkedIn today released a new unified search experience to help people dig faster, deeper, and more intelligently through its growing collection of professional content.

"We're bringing all of the goodness on LinkedIn -- people, companies, jobs, and groups -- and putting it all together in one place," Bradley Mauney, product lead for identity products at LinkedIn, told CNET.

After a year of behind-the-scenes design and engineering work, LinkedIn is now able to derive intent while you search. The site autocompletes queries to show suggestions, sorted by content type, as a person types in the new-and-improved, single search … Read more

LinkedIn tweaks Jobs tool to better tap user connections

LinkedIn has redesigned its LinkedIn Jobs tool in an effort to show job seekers positions they can actually get.

The professional social network today announced the launch of the new tool, which now showcases open positions at companies where a person has allies, or "first degree connections" in LinkedIn speak, who can get the candidate noticed.

The new jobs tool, which will be rolled out to all 200 million members over the next few weeks, also features added search and management tools. For instance, LinkedIn Jobs now lets people more deeply refine their searches for open positions with … Read more

LinkedIn rewards all employees with iPad Minis

With Valentine's Day just hours away, LinkedIn employees are really feeling the love -- from their CEO.

Chief Executive Jeff Weiner surprised the company's 3,458 full-time employees Wednesday when he revealed at an all-hands meeting that they were all getting iPad Minis.

"Jeff 'Winfrey' Weiner decided to give every [LinkedIn] employee an iPad Mini today as a special reward for our recent results," Mike Grishaver, a product manager who works on the company's marketing solutions team, posted on the business social network.

Employees are getting 32GB iPad Mini models in white or black. Krista … Read more

LinkedIn eyes future as professional publishing hub

LinkedIn spent much of 2012 transforming itself into a place where workers could stay and play a while -- a strategy that paid off handsomely. But the year ahead will be all about making the site the preferred destination for professional content, a transition that could make Wall Street's darling even more bewitching.

The professional network today reported earnings that blew the Street's socks off, so to speak. LinkedIn's stock is trading up close to 10 percent on the after-hours market because the company floored everyone with fourth-quarter adjusted earnings per share of 35 cents, revenue of $… Read more

LinkedIn stock soars after Q4 blowout

Mark it down as a blowout. LinkedIn earned 35 cents per share on sales of $303.6 million in the fourth quarter ended December 31, up 81 percent from the same period a year earlier.

Analysts had expected earnings of 19 cents per share on $280 million in revenue.

Net income in the quarter soared 66 percent to $11.5 million, compared with net income of $6.9 million for the fourth quarter of 2011.

Even though gross profit margins edged down to 37.9 percent from 41.2 percent a year earlier, Wall Street may like the headway the … Read more

Find out who has viewed your LinkedIn profile

If you are unemployed, unhappy at your current job, or simply curious about other opportunities, then you likely keep close tabs on your LinkedIn account. Users of LinkedIn's basic, free service get some information about who has viewed their account, like so:

The above box shows up on the right side of your profile page. Click on the link and you'll see the last five people who have viewed your profile, like so:

LinkedIn is a bit cagey, however, in letting users of its free service know exactly who is checking out their profile. For starters, you are … Read more

8 overused buzzwords to avoid on your LinkedIn profile

Who knew the world was so creative? That buzzword, "creative," is once again the world's most overused self-description on LinkedIn, as measured by descriptions in member profiles. Unless LinkedIn users are disproportionately creative, that wouldn't be the word most of us would use to describe most professionals we know (of course, all my colleagues are exceptionally creative and wonderful).

LinkedIn has released its analysis of the most commonly used adjectives (English and translated equivalents) in the "summary" section of profiles of its 187 million members (last year, the membership number was 135 million).

"… Read more