LinkedIn

[Kimberlee Burt]

Has anyone found a clever way to connect your ning network to Linkedin, eg profile or discussion groups?

[Laura]

Hi Kimberlee!

There isn't any sort of deep integration available. If LinkedIn allows for RSS feeds anywhere, you could certainly feed in from you Latest Activity, Forum, or any other feature on your network, to your LinkedIn profile.

Similarly, if LinkedIn provides any feed of group activity, you could add it via an RSS module, to your Main page or a Group page.

Not sure if anyone else here has other suggestions.

Hope this helps!
Laura

[Steve Cassady]

I run an alumni association website on Ning. I have created a Group in LinkedIn where those members can join. I use the RSS feed from the Ning Activity Feed and use it to feed the News in my LinkedIn Group. You just set it up once in the LinkedIn Group Features and every couple hours the LinkedIn Group News Feed is updated with the Ning Activity. About 1/3 of my Ning Members also have a LinkedIn profile. An advantage of this is that many large corporate networks block social networks such as Ning and Facebook, but allow access to LinkedIn. This allows my alumni to see what is going on during the day and encourage them to see the details when they are at home and off their corporate networks.

[Laura]

Great point Steve, and thanks for the tip!

Laura

[Tony Pinto]

This is great. I've wanted to create a LinkedIn group for a while now, and this gave me the impetus to finally get it done! Thanks, Steve.

[Steve Cassady]

If you have any questions, just let me know. Either the Group Owner or a Manager (think administrator in Ning network functionality) can set up a news feed located in the Group's news tab.

I can tell that since I have done it, visits to the Ning alumni network has gone up.

[Tony Pinto]

How did/do you get the word out about the new LI group?

[Steve Cassady]

I had several approaches.

First, LinkedIn was a source to generate my Ning Invites. Since I run a local
Chapter fraternal website, I used LinkedIn to find guys that were there the time I was there, which ended up being my "Beta Group" to seed the Ning site with discussions, blogs, and pictures. In effect, I had a group of 25 members as my network contacts in LinkedIn before I rolled out my Ning site.

Secondly, I announced the LInkedIn Group on my Ning site and had originally asked in the profile questions, their linkedin Profile address which I then promptly sent them invites to my new LinkedIn Group (I formed the LinkedIn Group about a year after I created the Ning site.)

Thirdly, I had a unique circumstance and was able to use LinkedIn's people search and used the advanced search feature for our College (Purdue) and word search for our Fraternity (Tau Kappa Epsilon) and found about 160 profiles that had both in them. From there I sent out invites to a selected few. You have to be careful here since five "I don't know" responses will cause the LinkedIn police to restrict your ability to do invites on LinkedIn. I then relied on the viral nature of networking to generate interests and then used LinkedIn's introduction feature to make further contacts. If you are a LinkedIn premium user, you can also use the InMail feature to generate network invites.

[Tony Pinto]

Nice. I appreciate the detailed response. I am a premium member, so I could probably leverage that a bit. My audience isn't quite as specific as yours (we're a cooking site), so I'm not sure if I'd have as much success in searching LI for potential members. Maybe chefs and other food/cooking professionals. I'll have to give it a shot. Thanks again.

[Alyea Sandovar]

This sounds really great! I am new to ning and was wondering if you could send detail instructions to do this? I actually wish we could integrate both. Particularly because linkedin offers the job posting functionality...

[Sue Mrithujayan]

Yes if u connect with involver, you can connect two link for free.....

[Kimberlee Burt]

Thank you all for your responses! What a lot of useful information. Really appreciate it. Cheers Kim

[Robin]

Anyone having issues adding their feed to LinkedIn. I just added mine and noticed several days later that it is still not feeding. I am just doing the blogs.