Swipp

While Facebook overhauls its ad products and the tech press waits breathlessly for Twitter’s IPO(including the obligatory somewhat-seedy insider backstory in the New York Times), LinkedIn has continued to power along, the slow-and-steady stalwart that sometimes seems surrounded by flashier upstarts. Yet, despite the comparative lack of mainstream headline-grabbing, LinkedIn has created a host of innovations and features that it pays to be aware of, and potentially incorporate into your marketing, lead generation and relationship-building activities.

#1: InMaps from LinkedIn Labs

Did you know that LinkedIn has a cool LinkedIn Labs area on their site? It’s where cool projects that have come out of hackathons, engineering side projects and experiments and the like come to roost.

One of these projects is InMaps, an explorable, expandable and amazing visual analysis of all the connections in your LinkedIn network. By color, it highlights various clusters of interconnected individuals, allowing you to see the latent networks you are connected to.

Notice all of the different color groups; each group represents a connected cluster by employer, education affiliation, conference attendance and the like. You can use InMaps to get better insight into the types of individuals you are connected to, and use that knowledge to extrapolate out the traits of others who you may want to build business relationships with. Here’s an overview video by DJ Patil, explaining InMaps.

#2: Topic-specific story channels

LinkedIn is increasingly becoming a content hub, not just a gathering place for resumes, recruiters and job-seekers. As part of this evolution, LinkedIn has set up myriad topic-specific channels for content forsocial media, marketing and a host of other topics.

#3: Join and connect with relevant LinkedIn groups

There are now over one million(!) LinkedIn groups covering every topic and geography. For the most part, I’ve found that the moderators do a good job at keeping the conversations on-topic, and curtailing overtly and overly spammy posts. (In fact, the groups even have a special tab for “promotions” where such conversations can be filtered, if need be.) With over 15,000 groups related to social media and over 1,000 just focusing on sales topics like lead generation, there are experts at the ready to engage in conversations around questions you may have. I’ve noticed that the groups are especially good for individuals just getting up to speed on a topic; the folks who have been around a while seem very willing and able to share their experiences with newcomers. It also can be quite valuable to start a group if a niche has yet to be filled, and Social Media Examiner has a very solid primer on how to start a LinkedIn Group that is a fine reference from which to start.