Brandhackers put together a great meeting tonight though it’s pretty noisy because MediaBistro has a networking party next door.

Linkedin is a professional network as much as a social network, started in May 2003.

Most popular in North America, goal is to get your profile is 100% complete, best not to cut and paste your resume and build something personal and unique.

Take a look at profiles that have many connections as an idea on how to structure yours. Building your profile also helps increase your Google Pagerank. Bear in mind there’s a private and public profile, and the private has more detail than the public one.

Degrees- interconnectedness, can invite all your email contacts to Linkedin selectively. People you may know (facilitates building your community) and Linkedin has a way to network to them. Profile data is very rich.

Targeting is very, very refined and you can even target by DMA. Groups- there are over 180,000 on Linkedin; suggest you take time to study the groups that exist and you may want to join. Like other Social Media, more you put into it, the better it is- usage – 30% comes in 5+ times a week. However, there’s a limit of 15 groups you can join to control bandwidth issues.

Answers- Answer questions on 1st – 3rd connection, and you can earn “points” by answering questions and which other members vote on, and all of this goes into your profile. Toucan establish yourself as an “expert” here and it can help you in your career.

Applications – for mobile, very useful, can help at conferences where you can get information on speakers and attendees instantly.

Polls – gain insight and identify trends, and the info you get is quite actionable. You can do it for free for your network or a paid service for marketers.

Leveraging Company pages – the company pages can adapt to viewers looking at them. Company pages are still in the early stage. Linkedin approach to API‘s – allow to work with other applications to allow you to keep your network up to date and present yourself and your work in new ways.

Events Application – you can get applications uploaded in mass if you want. 6800 events and growing fast.

Summary, – a lot of Linkedin reminded me of Facebook.

I learnt a lot that should help me in the weeks and months ahead.