Social Business Success

LinkedIn has been rolling out its new interface and Contacts application over the past couple of months, which means more users have the new interface and the Contacts application.  People are talking about LinkedIn more than now they’ve had in a while.  It seems it’s the topic of conversation for the time being.  Over the past couple of months I’ve been approached quite a bit about LinkedIn from individuals to colleges to businesses.

I have numerous LinkedIn trainings scheduled this summer, as I will be working with colleges and businesses.  The number one topic I get requests to talk about with LinkedIn is networking.

Spend sometime getting comfortable with the new interface and Contacts application.  The Contacts application works like a mini CRM program.  LinkedIn wants its users to import their contacts from their email address books. In the Contacts module (where your contacts are listed), LinkedIn will ask you numerous times to import your contacts from your other address books. After a while I felt like saying enough already.  Stop asking me to import my contacts.  Whether you do that or not is up to you. There are some LinkedIn power users that love the new  Contacts application.

The new Relationship or Contacts application

To me the contacts module offers more ways to sort your contacts.  LinkedIn left out one important feature in this module. The look up “by name” feature only looks up people by first name.  For most people, this will take a while to get used to.  We can only hope that LinkedIn is writing the feature that looks up people by last name.

I was reading online that a few people thought that LinkedIn did away with Signal.  I can understand that, because in the previous interface users could access Signal from the “New” menu.  However, one could always access signal by typing the  URL www.linkedin.com/signal/ .

LinkedIn has removed some features and added new ones.  One of my favorite features LinkedIn took away was to email a person that sent me an invite without connecting.  However, I found a couple of work arounds that work just as well.

One thing LinkedIn needs to decide is what type of product do they want to create and what does their customer, their user look like?  Has LinkedIn moved away from their customer, their user?  What do you think?

What are your thoughts about LinkedIn’s new interface and features?  What new features do you like and which ones do you miss?

I like to know your thoughts.