Chetan105

Top 2 Reasons LinkedIn Is Taking Over the World

I’m fascinated by LinkedIn, which now seems to me like a combination virtual headhunter and 21st-century international water cooler. Even though I’ve been on Linkedin for years, I started to notice it for real about 18 months ago, when Therese Miclot, our wonderful Practice Director of Training and de facto recruiter, began finding her best job candidates on Linkedin.  Then I read an article about the importance of growing your network on LinkedIn, so I began inviting people to connect (and getting lots of invitations in return).

But the big shift in my thinking came when a post I had written here on Forbes went viral (it now has almost half a million pages views), and it turned out that the main impetus was the the fact that it showed up on the Linkedin home page.

Now I was really interested.  I’ve since been trying to figure out how best to use it, and I’m still trying to get my head around it.  The very best article I’ve found so far is an aggregation of other articles by the folks on a website called linkedintelligence.com, whose tagline is “Linked Intelligence is the unofficial source for all things LinkedIn™.”

In my travels, I’ve discovered that LinkedIn now has 135 million members, all over the world, and that professionals are joining at an ongoing rate of 2 per second. That’s right, do the math – it comes out to around 170,000 every 24 hours.

It’s a perfectly timed phenomenon.  It combines two critical elements:

The astonishing capability of social media to create a one-to-one personal connection with virtually anyone
The demands on most businesses – even small businesses – to operate nationally and, yes, globally

Think about it in terms of job search and hiring, one of LinkedIn’s most popular uses.  Even in this era, almost 50% of people say they got their job through personal connections and networking.  LinkedIn allows for personal connection at a distance.  When you get someone’s resume on LinkedIn, you also get a lot of other information that you’d otherwise only get by meeting him or her – you can even see how many degrees of separation you are from that person.  It ‘feels’ personal.  And you can get those resumes from all over the world.

We recently needed to find an extremely skilled instructor and consultant who was completely bi-lingual, who had lived and worked in both North and South America, and who would be comfortable working as a contract consultant with us (at least initially) vs. coming on staff.  LinkedIn delivered us Ivan D. Cortes, who is all we wanted and more – and who, I’m certain, we never would have found without LInkedIn.

Voila: Personal + global business.

The same is true in the area of sales and customer acquisition. We’ve all become used to having access to an incredible variety of goods and services; we expect it.  But we often still want to have a personal connection to the company offering us those goods and services – we want to deal with someone who we trust and who we believe understands our needs; the habit of thousands of years of making transactions with individuals doesn’t evaporate in a generation.  LinkedIn can offer that: a fairly 3-D connection with a business and the people who operate it and sell their wares to you…anywhere in the world.

Again: personal + global business.

I’m going to be even more fascinated to see where it goes from here: I get the feeling it’s going to get ever more useful as it evolves and as we all figure out collectively what it can be to us.

http://www.forbes.co...over-the-world/

Nice find Chetan, I hope that IPS sees the same potential as we board administrators see in this feature.

Chadi, on 11 April 2012 - 07:20 AM, said:

Invision Power Services, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of IP.Board 3.3.1, IP.Blog 2.5.2 and IP.SEO 1.5.2

Everyone at IPS is very proud of IP.Board 3.3.1, IP.Blog 2.5.2 and IP.SEO 1.5.2 updates. We have worked hard to create a quality, modern community platform and the feedback from our clients has been tremendous.

We are releasing the following new software:

IP.Board 3.3.1
Fully featured community platform including forums, members profiles, calendar, status system, integration, and much, much more.

IP.Blog 2.5.2
Integrated blogging software for IP.Board. Allow your members to create and manage their own blogs.

IP.SEO 1.5.2
Provides additional search engine optimization features and tools to our software such as site-maps and customisable metadata tags.

Requirements / Notes

IP.Blog and IP.SEO require IP.Board version 3.2.x or 3.3.x

Installing / Upgrading

For further assistance on installing these updates please refer to this document and for upgrading please refer to this document

If you are using the archive system, first available in IP.Board 3.3.0, then you'll need to perform an additional step after upgrading.

Security Updates for IP.Board 3.3.0, 3.2.x

IP.Board 3.3.0
Simply upgrade to 3.3.1. Contact technical support if you need assistance.

IP.Board 3.2.0, 3.2.1, 3.2.2, 3.2.3
Simply download the zip file and upload the files to your server. Directory structure has been retained so you can easily identify where to upload the files.

 3_2_3_April_Patch.zip   56.63K   1023 downloads

Gallery 4.2.0, 4.2.1
Simply download the zip file and upload the file to your server. Directory structure has been retained so you can easily identify where to upload the files.

 Gallery_4_2_1_April.zip   4.02K   574 downloads

As much as your entitled to your own opinion, just because you like all those social garbage websites, doesn't mean others do. The less of that garbage i have with my IP.Board's, the happier i will be.

Although you have good ideas and i agree with you regarding your suggestions that if they were implemented, it would be better... Saying that this software will die in 5 years if it doesn't have these changes is just hilarous. This software is over ten years old and if you were using it for all those years, you would have never ever said that this software can at any point in time die.

This software has gone a long way since it first came out and it has introduced features and functionality that other content management systems could only dream of so if anything, this operating system is going to live long and prosper and possibly take over the internet because of its fantastic design and programming.

FB will be dead in less then 3 years... so see.. we all have opinions...  Remember myspace?

IP.Board 3.1.x and Applications: End of Life Announcement

So that we can focus all of our development, support, and service efforts on the newest version 3.3, we are announcing the end of support (sometimes called end of life or EOL) for the following IPS software versions (and earlier versions):

• IP.Board 3.1.x
  
• IP.Blog 2.2.x
  
• IP.Gallery 3.2.x
  
• IP.Downloads 2.2.x
  
• IP.Content 2.0.x
  
• IP.Chat 1.1.x
  
• IP.Nexus 1.1.x

Technical support, installations, and services will end for these products on August 1, 2012. On that date all technical or service requests will be advised to simply upgrade to the most recent versions of the products. We will not force upgrades but will also not be able to diagnose issues or answer questions relating to the older software. Also, on that date, IPS will no longer address any new issues or bugs reported in the older software versions.

You are of course free to continue using these older versions if you wish but IPS will no longer provide assistance after the EOL date.

Security Updates

In the event an issue is discovered impacting the security of these older versions of the software, IPS will provide a patch posted in our announcements forum. We will continue to provide security updates for several months after the EOL date based on severity of the issue.

Internet Explorer 7 Support

We announced our plans to start phasing out support for Internet Explorer 7 in December 2010 and have been slowly doing so. As of this date, IPS will no longer support Internet Explorer 7. This includes compatibility modes in newer browsers.

From an SEO indexing perspective, the simple default pagination on IP.Board is pretty bad. Especially for larger boards.

Google deems content less and less important, the deeper in to the website it is. The more clicks it takes to get to a piece of content, the deeper it is classed and thus the more difficult it will be to rank.

By having limited paging options, it takes more clicks to get to older posts, than it would if there were say 1-10 paging.

The bigger the forum, the most of an issue this will be.

I recommend those of you who run big forums, alter your paging to show 1-5 or 1-10 and your forum will be better indexed and traffic will likely increase.

I was hoping this was going to be included in the 3.3 SEO update, but it appears not as IPB is currently running 3.3. Perhaps it's something that could be added before the final release?

I have lots of data to backup my theory if anybody is interested.

Thanks for reading.

Great idea, especially for educational, scientific forums and so on. I would really love this.

+1 from me as well.

Excellent idea.

+ 1

I would strongly support this idea. It would offer my community (architects) very strong and usefull tool and the product would gain a few extra points against the competitors.

Thank you for your guys input. Furthermore, I believe that there is a bigger demand for this feature than is currently being indicated in this topic therefore I decided to 'bump' this topic.

So, when will this be added?