LinkedIn, the boring social network that won’t find you a date but may land you a job, is expanding beyond people profiles.
On Friday morning they will launch company profile pages that partly serve as fact sheets for about 160,000 companies and partly serve to reveal the connections that members have with them.
These private pages (you have to be signed in to see them) pull in some information from Capital IQ, a sister company to BusinessWeek, such as company descriptions, industries, types, statuses, headquarter addresses, sizes, founding dates, and websites. Many of the companies to which people belong on LinkedIn, however, aren’t big enough for Capital IQ to recognize them. So the bulk of the data shown on these company pages comes from LinkedIn’s own knowledge of people’s careers.
LinkedIn uses this knowledge to display recent hires, related companies, recent promotions, top locations for employees, and so-called “popular profiles” (people who get lots of profile views and mentions in the press). The data has also been used for company comparison purposes. You can see which companies employees usually come from and leave for, as well as which companies the current employees are most connected to.
Additional features include relevant news articles to a company (first discovered on LinkedIn last December) and personalized job listings.
The company says that it plans to wiki-fy these company profile pages in the next few months, allowing employees to edit company overviews, upload logos, and add other custom modules. Some of the information on these pages will also be distributable via widget.
The addition of company profile pages (which, dare I say, remind me of Facebook network pages) and the plans for more user generated content are good moves for LinkedIn, since the company needs to give users better reasons to return and use the site on a regular basis.
LinkedIn says it attracts one million new users each month and plans to have company profiles for a million companies. The social network has raised $27.5M so far.
Natural evolution.. facebook excels at that…
This in itself isn’t a bad idea, but I have noticed lately that LinkedIn is getting more and more cluttered. It used to be so simple and clean-looking.
Do all social networks trend towards MySpace in the long run?
Too much profi.I think #1 trend for LinkedIn is advanced wiki.
excellent idea and great review!
“facebook excels at that”….. WTF, are you serious.
Big job boards like Monster and CareerBuilder better watch out with this and the new LinkedIn Recruiter product…
>“facebook excels at that”….. WTF, are you serious.
Yes–talking about natural evolution per se..
This is great news, while LinkedIn can be a little dry at times, I def don’t agree with a strong a statement as: “the boring social network”.
For its purpose of business networking and job/employee leads, it’s one of the best (actually in my humble opinion…the best for biz networking).
Next to Google, it’s the next best 3rd party verification tool on potential partners, clients, employers and employees.
That all being said, it could take a thing or two from Tribe.net which, also in my opinion, is the most balanced, clean and functional social site of them all, to date. Facebook and others really lack the spark that Tribe captured for us west coast, dot-com burner-types.
LinkedIn is a great business tool, hence this is a natural step in their evolution. They continue to make great product design decisions while recognizing their market niche. Good move, great service.
Definitely a smart move. I agree with the folks above - other job boards had better watch this move carefully. LinkedIn is becoming more nimble and making moves that may put them out of business very soon.
Why upload a resume when you can view and transport your job profile, accessible from anywhere?
I agree it’s a great recruiting tool. Except at very low levels, it’s not useful for networking. Plus, LinkedIn gets so much money from the recruiting that they should really focus more in that direction (change their branding to make it more clear rather than pretend to be something you’re not, etc…)
As an employer, you should always try your best to retain the best. The more and more features of linkedin.com make an employer retain star performers with more and more difficulty because all the social networking features of linkedin.com possibly makes every one knows every one else in a specific field.
Put simply, as an employer, today you can hire the best by using linkedin.com. However, tomorrow you will possibly lose the best through linkedin.com. I don’t know how a typical employer thinks about the turnover rate issue caused by linkedin.com. Could anyone shed some light on this for me? Thanks.
Mark, I fail to see how these new company profile pages remind you of Facebook’s network pages. The screenshot of linkedin’s Google profile is infinitely more interesting and useful. Clearly a win for LinkedIn.
Look forward to seeing the wiki-ified versions.
very cool enhancement - a logical update
wow, a reason to use linkedin. . .
. . .but then again, thats what bugmenot is for
“LinkedIn, the >>>boring<<< social network …”
Why did techcrunch writers became such trolls?
Mark and Erick should calm down. Respect the market you cover and your readers.
This is a smart feature that I’m sure the recruiters will love. But I’m not so sure all of the companies will want their competitors seeing who their employees are and who they have recently hired. Yes, this information can be found on their site if you spend some time gathering it. However, now they are putting it all together under the umbrella of the company’s name, which may or may not have given permission to use their brand name. Think about it. If you are Nike and you just hired 3 executives to design a shoe that Flies. Now, one of these execs. list his title on Linkedin as Brand Manager of the Flying Shoe. This is not something you want to advertise because Adidas is going to read your company profile everyday and they will also begin to build a Flying Shoe.
I smell a lawsuit.
@ bboing, agreed. “LinkedIn, the “professional” or “useful” social network…” would have been more appropriate imo.
@ lawsuit time, in your hypothetical example, the onus should be on the newly hired Nike executives to resist updating their respective linkedin profiles until after the “Flying Shoe” has launched.
how will they decide who is authorised to edit the company page? authenticating ‘admins’ for 160,000 companies sounds like a major headache to me!
Linkedin with its pay model, stands there a lot better than facebook !
“the boring social network that won’t find you a date but may land you a job”
Great line Mark!
The new UI is much cleaner, and the new company profile looks great. It’s buggy though - ours reflects our old company name from stealth mode! Everyone has updated their profiles months ago but somehow the old name got lodged in the LinkedIn database.
So, this is basically what Hoover’s has been offering on the web, with your connections superimposed on top? Ok, but hardly seems that newsworthy as a feature.
Once again, where’s the value? Let me see… I can now review information about a Fortune 500 company on LinkedIn - as opposed to visiting the companies own UPDATED website? Weak.
Hmmm… Let me guess… 18 of these 21 positive comments are probably coming from people who work at LinkedIn. I guess they need to find something for their 100+ employees to do… because they sure can’t innovate.
I always love watching LinkedIn’s web demos of their new features. It’s like they’re scrambling to find a reason why the new feature is relevant. Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1VbKLu5llI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy1cTWXlF0c
For most web companies ( with under 10 employees ), there’s no clear way to create your company profile. Why can’t I create my own company profile?
LinkedIn: Upload all your business contacts. Then watch as your competitors steal them.
LinkedIn: evil evil evil.
Pretty interesting visualization to find people around you. Particularly useful if you’re looking to apply for a job.
But yeah - I’m interested how they plan on wiki-fying these pages.
I can’t seem to find the pages… how do I get to them?
This is pretty interesting, I might have to check this out and give it a shot. Ive been looking a for a job for like a long time, but just have no luck and I’m a high school student and I have a few certifications in computer networking and what not. and some high honors and stuff like that. this could help, i guess you never know
It’s friday evening and I don’t see this feature yet on LinkedIn. Wheres it?
Hey haven’t you heard of Virtudex.com? It’s the best business social network. Invite only so here is the pass code - 1z1code Lets see they have Blogs, Groups, Personal File manager, Homepage news feeds with RSS, the best privacy settings I’ve ever seen on a social networking site…
I love it….GREAT move. The biz profiles impressed me much more than I had thought.
LinkedIn sells your employee data at the same time they take money for your job postings.
Even head hunters have non-solicitation clauses and know that is unethical. Imagine being less ethical than a head hunter. Join the campaign to change your LinkedIn screen name to FU LI. Take back your information, and keep the wolves at bay
Admittedly it’s not fully implemented yet (it takes a while to get to the pages), but what they have done looks good so far.
Great!
-Steven Burda, MBA
http://www.linkedin.com/in/burda
@Voices
with Upspring, you can create business and professional profiles for all company sizes. Currently, we’re serving businesses in the Bay Area… we’re looking to expand our services to more cities overtime.