Linkedin Group – What’s Hot – Week 16/08/2009

This post is by Anne Thornley-Brown, she is the Linkedin Event Planning & Management Group Manager. Her company Executive Oasis International specializes in team building and incentive travel. Meet the rest of the team!

Number of Members: 10,545
Member of the Week: August 16 – 21, 2009 Chad Rothschild MBA, Marketing & Branding Expert, Author, Speaker
August 9 – 15, 2009 John Gibb, Marketing Executive, Greater New York CIty
New Members: 100+
Newest Member: Alice Sydow, Freelance Travel & Event Manager, Promotional Model, & Stylist, Volare Events
New discussions: 23
New news articles: 8
Most active thread of the Week: Conference Online Registration Site. Does anyone know of a company offering a similar service to ‘Survey Monkey’ for simple online conference registration? – 12 Comments (Posted by Rosanna Spataro)
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Linkedin Group – What’s Hot – Week 02/08/2009

This post is by Anne Thornley-Brown, she is the Linkedin Event Planning & Management Group Manager and President, Executive Oasis International, team building and incentive travel specialists. Meet the rest of the team!

With over 10,000 members from all over the world, Event Planning and Management is one of the fastest growing groups on Linkedin. The group is designed to promote discussion, sharing of ideas & networking by professionals in all areas of the event planning industry. The group provides an opportunity for members to:

- Share their experience and best practices
- Ask questions
- Ask for opinions
- Post job offers
- Share and discuss articles and news stories
- Discuss current trends in the event planning industry
- Anyone involved in event planning or interested in an event planning career is welcome.

So What’s New?

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Xing Event in London, good start!

Last week I had the chance to attend the first Xing event held in London. Definitely great fun and spot on.

Xing has been advertising heavily in London lately. You could see the ad below pretty much everywhere on the tube.

Image by edmittance via Flickr

As an active networker, I checked it out and was definitely impressed. The interface is much better than Linkedin and it serves the networking purpose in greater detail (Wants/Haves section).

I was also happy to receive almost two years of premium membership for free just inviting my network to join (you get a month every 10 new sign ups).

What got me hooked up with Xing is the focus on events. They have a large, dedicated section and they feature Xing official events. Now you know I run a Meetup called Linked in London. I’d have been much happier if Linkedin did it for me, but my emails never got a reply.

To demonstrate the difference in the approach, Xing has an ambassador program which empowers top local users to carry events and evangelise on the territory. The major concern of Linkedin, on the other hand, appears to be cashing in the premium membership, although they recently replied to a post in this blog and possibly things are changing.

Going back to the event, it was very packed. They announced 75% turn up rate which is impressive, considering that the event was free and we all know how though is to get people to show when there’s no money involved.

Food was great, free drinks and several goodies. Now this is what I am talking about.

What Xing understood very well is that online networking is a tool to network better offline. And they delivered a great event to do so.

I also had the chance to chat with Liz, UK and Ireland BDM who was very nice and welcoming.

I definitely suggest you get a profile there and join our Events 2.0 Group!

New Events section on Linkedin

Linkedin yesterday introduced a new event section, here are the first impressions

If you use Linkedin and follow me on twitter, you know I have been talking about Linkedin introducing http://events.linkedin.com thanks to Brian pointing that out.

Up until yesterday nobody knew what the section was for. Linkedin is very popular within the community for not talking to users but just announcing changes in a oligarchic style. This was no exception.

So what happens is that yesterday I saw magically appearing on the right hand side of the screen an “Events” widget.

No news here as if you are on Xing they have a super cool event section as well as an ambassador program with Xing official events (1st in UK on Nov 25, 2008 in London)

I started to add the events for the Linkedin Event Planning & Management Group as well as ecoCamp and an online free seminar I am running on how to improve your career using Linkedin.

The RSVP section is also an highlight. You can point out whether you are presenting, exhibiting, attending or organizing.

In your My Events section you have some stats about the events you are running.

The event section is very well done. You have extensive tag area, a description and you can highlight the job roles interested in the event. When I added ecoCampLondon which has an RSVP in place on EventBrite the system automatically filled in the fields which is a great thing.

There is a promotional section where you can forward the event to your connections. What a disappointment to discover you can send it to a maximum of 10 connections, may work for a pub crawl though.

In the Browse Events Section they talk about Premium Event Opportunities. At the moement you can just send an email, which I did obviously with no reply (why not a messenger pigeon then?)

My first impressions in the end are mixed.

On one hand I welcome the long awaited change. It took Linkedin 3 years to realize events are a huge chunk of online networking.

On the other hand, I am simply getting tired of Linkedin not getting in touch with its user base. I expected they got in touch with our/their community of almost 4000 event professionals to get feedback on how to develop the service.

What’s your opinion? Have you tried the service?

I’ll also ping Jason Alba, a Linkedin guru, to tell us his experience and thoughts.

Top five ways to keep your career going

Photo by James Gordon

If you are experiencing the negative impact of the economic crisis or you find very difficult to keep up with new technologies this post will help you in keeping up.

I am not sure if you are aware but there is a community of event professionals which is facing new economic and technology challenges brilliantly. I talk to them over twitter, I see them interacting in the Linkedin Discussions, I meet them at free networking events or at BarCamps. They save money using free software, the cut budgets promoting on social networks the maximise satisfaction by integrating new technologies.

There are few easy steps to keep yourself ahead of the game and be up to date with what is going on with Event Planning 2.0. I’ll be happy to assist you in this and you will notice most of the first steps involve me. Nonetehelss, as soon as you’ll join, you will find like minded people willing to help, possibly in your area and with great expertise.

1. Join the Linkedin Events Group and add me as a direct contact there.

Get in touch with me, send me messages and participate to discussions.

You cannot afford to be shy or to just read. Get active.

I’ll be soon hosting a free webinar on how to get a better job using Linkedin, followed by an online speed networking session. You should not miss that! All the info in the Linkedin Events group discussions.

2. Join the group networking events in your area.
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