‘Sup Over At Linked In?

Linked In is a site you either love or hate. I am in the love column. I find it a great alternative to a rolodex, and have gotten connected to some great people and opps through it. It’s also a sure fire way of knowing if someone is contemplating a job change – just check to see if they have friended 137 people in the last week.

Quantcast reports 5.5 million monthly uniques for Linked In. The company has not made other Quantcast data public, as is their right.

The Linked In model was never designed to make it the biggest soc net around; rather it was to be focused on a highly desirable professional audience – one with which the company could garner strong CPMs.

It was a pretty staid environment for a while, but more recently they’ve begun to offer groups, a sort of B2B Yahoo answers, and even the opportunity to do research studies against specific job titles and categories. Of that last opp I can attest to how difficult it can be to find sufficient samples of highly specialized job functions – so this giant database will prove very helpful to me in the not too distant future.

One of the really positive things, in my opinion, has been Linked In’s expansion to having a strong beachhead in many job functions and industries, versus the usual online suspects of IT, DBA, and the like. This not only enriches the community; it also helps make them immune to temporary business fluctuations that may adversely affect certain advertising sectors.

Linked In has also become very active on the modular content/widget front, offering units that detail user profiles, contacts to companies described on a page, job listings, and the like. Their 1 month traffic figures show a strong uptick – no doubt due both to these innovations and the soft job market.

Yes yes, yes, there are lots of people using FaceBook for professional networking. But Linked In does offer one critical advantage over FBs: it is 100% zombie and vampire free.

So lots going on over there, as there needs to be to compete with FB and others. But it is nice to see them energized and innovating after a couple of quiet years.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to write.