In a staggering move, Linkedin opened up its API allowing Group owners to integrate Groups to their websites. Adding a community to your event website has never been easier. This post has been written by Julius Solaris for Event Manager Blog (?).
LinkedIn Groups are the single most successful initiative the platform features. Being the founder of a 35K member LinkedIn Group for Event Professionals, I can see the power of running a successful LinkedIn Group.
The problem until now has been that Groups were tied to the LinkedIn platform. If you built a community on LinkedIn you had no way to integrate that onto your event website.
Not cool, right?
Good News
LinkedIn has now opened up its Group API. Wait a sec, what is an API?
What it means for event professionals is that your event attendees will now be able to:
– Get Group Discussions by Popularity and Recency
– Get My Group Memberships
– Get Suggested Groups
– Join a Group
– Post new group discussions
– Comment, like and follow group discussions
– Establish connections with other professionals
All of the above on your website!
Focus on Events
LinkedIn wrote a blog post on the subject, featuring a case study – indeed for an event website. The Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference to be precise.
Have a look at it in action. What an amazing way to pull Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn together, although I must admit I had some issues using it with Chrome.
What are the benefits?
You’d be amazed!
First of all you now have a way to seamlessly feature a community on your website. You do not have to host it yourself or integrate with standalone services, you can leverage on the depth of the LinkedIn platform. That makes signing up for your community a no-brainer. You can happily say goodbye to trying to convince attendees to register to ‘yet-another-community’.
Secondly you will be able to pull the users that LinkedIn refers to your group to your event website, making groups become powerful marketing opportunities.
Thirdly by having a quick look at how the API works, you can make LinkedIn Groups become your backchannel. Attendees will be able to use it to interact and network during the event,
How can you bring LinkedIn Groups to your event website?
For the time being you need a good developer who knows how to play with APIs. But I can foresee widgets and easy to use modules populating the internet in a matter of days.
This is exciting!
