What LinkedIn Searchable Groups could be…
During the Facebook frenzy of the last year or so I have heard over and over that Facebook will kill LinkedIn, or LinkedIn is playing catch-up to Facebook, or some derivative of that theme. This is of course based on the meteoric rise of Facebook’s user base, even within the 40 something segment where I reside. While I understand the thought process of this, I simply don’t get the utility out of Facebook that I get out of LinkedIn. Now, one could counter that LinkedIn isn’t any fun, which is true – but it is useful, specially finding people with specific expertise in something I need.
But if I take a step back for a minute, LinkedIn could be so much cooler.
Let’s take a real world example. Two years ago my daughter was doing a report on 3D rendering. I thought it would be cool to find out what rendering platforms existed and what people were using out there. It dawned on me to go to LinkedIn and look for people that worked at Pixar in the off chance I may know someone. It ended up that I found a guy that worked with a friend of mine from the simulation group back at NASA. This guy was a technical director on the movie Ratatouiie that was then in production. Using LinkedIn and my friend I was able to get a conference call scheduled and my daughter and I spent a hour learning about the profession, the tools, etc. All very cool, a total LinkedIn success story.
After that call it dawned on me how cool would it be if I could search for information though that person. Surely Pixar Guy had bookmarks in del.icio.us, perhaps things he has written that appear online, maybe even a blog. We were lucky that Pixar Guy would take an hour out of their busy day to take a call with a teenager and her dad, but for everyone person like that there are probably a 100 that would not. If I could leverage that person’s knowledge without having to bother them how cool would that be. Of course, Lijit is in the search space focused on finding information through people and their connections so the leap was easy for me to make.
Yesterday, LinkedIn announced Searchable Groups Directory and this morning I checked out their blog to see what it was all about.
LinkedIn now allows self forming professional groups to create a tighter Link between each other. For instance one group in their screen image is the CIO forum. Imagine being able to search (for information) through some of the world’s top CIO’s. That would be an interesting perspective on enterprise software for sure.
So, for fun I decided to take a look what an integration of LinkedIn and Lijit may look like. The results were pretty cool.
Click on my hacked version of my LinkedIn page and then enter a search term in the new “Search My Content” field. I listed myself on LinkedIn as a startup CEO and CTO so a natural search term to enter maybe something like “Angel Financing“.
This could be a whole new layer of engagement within LinkedIn that provides even more use to me. In fact, based on the information that I can glean it would seem I would be a lot more likely to use the LinkedIn Answers because I drilled down on useful information..
Now image this capability tied to the LinkedIn Searchable Groups feature they just released. Essentially this would become the world’s largest vertical search engine generator. How cool is that?
