LinkedIn introduced a number of changes to their Events section yesterday.
Here is what you need to know.
Publishing events on LinkedIn is becoming a routine marketing activity for event lovers.
LinkedIn sometimes represents the only social channel for large conference organizers or event planning businesses. It is in fact much easier to prospect potential attendees on LinkedIn thanks to its rich profiling. That cannot be said for Twitter, where profiles are made of 160 characters or for Facebook, where privacy gateways prevent marketing effort.
Jimmy Chen over at the LinkedIn blog writes that:
In the past year alone, we’ve had over a million RSVPs to hundreds of thousands of professional events on LinkedIn Events.
Well, that is massive and cannot be ignored.
There were few changes. Some good news, some bad news. Let’s have a look.
Stronger Recommendations
Recommendations based on our social graph are fantastic. The power of social graph can be admired in Twitter’s suggested followers or Facebook’s “Your Friends Liked this page” features.
LinkedIn is recommending events on the basis of the events your network is attending. This has substantial marketing implications for event planners.
Obtaining an RSVP on LinkedIn now mean that a particular event is exposed to the network of the attendee as a recommendation.
People You May Want to Meet
I love this feature as it really embodies what LinkedIn is all about. Networking.
Here is the feature explained in LinkedIn’s words:
We’ve built a set of tools to highlight people at the event. For a quick glance at some valuable new connections, we’ve built a feature called “Attendees You May Want To Meet”.
Sharing and Directions
This is really no big news and possibly a cool feature in 2007.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good thing to have, but should have happened a few years ago.
No API
One of the most exciting features launched on LinkedIn this year was the Groups API. There is a lot you can do with it.
We were waiting for LinkedIn to release an API for Events. That would have helped us event lovers a lot.
Funny, because they mentioned that:
Because we understand the importance of events to our members, we’ve taken their feedback and made some key improvements to LinkedIn Events.
Well, they haven’t taken our 45K event planners group feedback. Which is kind of funny and tells a bit of a story.
I am faithful though that we’ll get it soon. Let’s wait and see.
