MMLGF 8: Exporting your LinkedIn groups activity (Blogging?)

Everybody knows that LinkedIn provide us with some tools and also with a website where we can do direct marketing about ourselves and our needs, and also find people (doing marketing about themselves) that can be future clients, partners or providers.

 

In previous posts on this long series, I’d been writing ideas like:

• Benefits on showing your activity on your public profile
• Advantages of using small boxes with each group’s information on our LinkedIn home
• Benefits on including LinkedIn Groups’ activity on LinkedIn Search

Implementation of those ideas would add great value and would let you do direct marketing easily. But, what other thing would add more value to you and your direct marketing task? The answer is exporting as RSS Feed, Web Services, etc all your LinkedIn (groups) activity.

 

Exporting your LinkedIn groups’ activity (for example your questions, your answers, some specific search or just whatever you can imagine) would be definitely great.

 

Why this is great? Because you will have the chance to show what you do, what you think, what you are looking at, what you are looking for and what you ……. (Complete with the verb you want).

So what? You would use all that staff not only inside LinkedIn but also outside of it.

What are the benefits for users?

• If you export what you ask, then you can put those questions anywhere and, first, bring traffic and readers to LinkedIn. Second, promote your question anywhere probably getting more answers and, third, be aware of how important your questions are, how much readers your questions have by using some RSS Feed tools like feedburner.com.
• If you export your answers then in some way these spread answers you do can be taken as a group and share all together like if you were writing a blog. So, your answers are your blog… 🙂
• If you export some specific search, then you are building a feed with some kind of “what I’m reading”.
• If you export what you ……. (Completed before with the verb you wanted) then you can do what you want (do business, implement your website with “best answers”, etc.)

 

This is post #8 of the (M)aking the (M)ost of (L)inkedIn (G)roups (F)unctionality (MMLGF) Series.

MMLGF 7: LinkedIn Groups activity included on Linkedin Search

In previous posts on this MMLGF Series I talked about using the information you and your LinkedIn groups produce by adding it to your public profile. That way you can do marketing about yourself (or maybe about your company services as well, or even your objectives whatever those would be) even better than now.

 

This issue is very important because you can show yourself better and actively but I guess there is somewhere your LinkedIn groups’ activity should be included: LinkedIn Search.

 

How your LinkedIn groups’ activity can be used in Search? I imagine lot of ways but I guess there are some places where/when that feature should be included:

• You answer a question and your answer was classified as a good one, then some related words (maybe using some keywords included in the question) can be added to your keywords so you can be found when someone looks for that precise keyword.
• Like LinkedIn Recommendations we can think about having some “expertise” from your activity / number of answers / questions so you can make a gift to someone that you know or consider he/she has great expertise. It’s like a recommendation that impact directly into your chance to be found when someone makes a search.

 

For sure those ideas would bring more participation and traffic to LinkedIn because what you do is used by LinkedIn for you directly and indirectly. With directly, I mean what you do will let you do direct marketing about your needs and I consider indirect usage when LinkedIn takes some keywords on your good answers on a topic at a LinkedIn Group and add these as a way to find you.

 

This is post #7 of the (M)aking the (M)ost of (L)inkedIn (G)roups (F)unctionality (MMLGF) Series.

Filtering LinkedIn Question and Answers to see what you want…

I’ve always been attracted by LinkedIn Question and Answer feature and particularly attracted in some sections like Offshoring and Outsourcing (link a:  ), Technology and its also internal categories and Using LinkedIn.

 

Nevertheless, there is too much information and too less time with me to be there. I want to go directly to what I looking for without wasting my time in some questions and topics that aren’t my business.

 

So… how can I get what I’m looking for? As an example, I will say:

I’m interested in questions on Technology about some tech issues like .NET, C# and Object Oriented (because this issues is what I do every day) and no more than that (I mean, I don’t want questions about PERL or Web hosting or whatever).

 

What do I have to do now if I want to get that? LinkedIn offers two different ways to get questions and Answers. The first one is navigating through the LinkedIn.com website making manually advanced searches on the topics you are interested in and then, read questions that appear on the search result.

 

 

The second way is getting the RSS feeds of each answer category you want (look at the second picture) and then, using a Feed Filter and Combine website or tool do the advanced search you want to and read them on a feed reader like Google Reader, bloglines.com or whatever feed reader you use.

 

 

 

 WHAT??? “Using a Feed Filter and Combine website or tool”??? Yes, exactly that. There are some websites like feedrinse or blasfeed that let the user do some filter and combine issues to get exactly what they are looking for.

With both of those websites you can filter my sample idea (getting just .NET , C# and Object Oriented topics) from LinkedIn Technology questions and get a very small feed with exactly what you are looking for in an automatically way. It costs some initial time to sign up on those websites and configure filter and combine options but I must say that you will be very happy with what you will get from them.

 

By the way, I had been using Feedrinse in a RSS feed widget on my blog home page till a week ago. I haven’t experienced too much performance when using it but I guess my Feeds filtering/combination was extremely big so I can’t say a word but thanks for giving me that good service and doing for free.

Just take a look at those websites and do filtering and combination of whatever you want to get the most from Linkedin Answers.