Leverage LinkedIn with RSS

What if your num­ber one com­peti­tor took away your num­ber one client?  How much would you pay to know that they might be in con­ver­sa­tion with one another?  Well, if you use LinkedIn and com­bine it with RSS you can dis­cover a wealth of infor­ma­tion about your friends, your clients, and your col­leagues that might have oth­er­wise gone unno­ticed — and it will cost you nothing.

Sure, you read the lat­est updates part of your LinkedIn home page when you visit, but what about the rest of the time.  Cer­tainly much is tran­spir­ing while you are away — some of which is impor­tant to know.  Here is an easy solu­tion — RSS.  You can very eas­ily use an RSS feed, which is built into LinkedIn, to track each and every change that takes place in your LinkedIn net­work.  Then you can review and cat­a­log every­thing at your leisure.

It is as easy as this.

• Go to reader.google.com and sign up for an account
• Go to your LinkedIn homepage
• Look in the address bar and click on the lit­tle orange (blue in Fire­fox 3) box with the dot and 2 lines.
• Sub­scribe to the RSS feed.

Now, every time some­one makes a change you will receive an update, which will appear as an unread item in your RSS feeds in Google Reader.  Now, you can quickly scan through the entire list of updates in one or two minutes.

As you pro­ceed through them, you can mark items of par­tic­u­lar inter­est with a star.  This might apply for peo­ple who have been pro­moted or changed jobs — at which time you might want to send along a nice note of congratulations.

This aggre­ga­tion of infor­ma­tion makes it sim­ple to gen­er­ate intu­itive infor­ma­tion from your LinkedIn Net­work.  Whether you seek com­pet­i­tive intel­li­gence, per­sonal infor­ma­tion, or just want to make sure who are keep­ing up with who knows who, RSS makes it easy.  Did your #1 com­peti­tor just con­nect with your #1 client?  Using this method would let you know.  Is your best employee look­ing to leave your com­pany?  Again, this might give you some clues if that is the case.  Best of all, you might find out early enough to actu­ally do some­thing about it.  Per­son­ally, I can tell you of sev­eral peo­ple cur­rently in the job mar­ket sim­ply based on watch­ing my con­nec­tions.  They have not con­tacted me say­ing “I’m look­ing” but it does not take much to con­nect the dots when you pay atten­tion.  This give me an oppor­tu­nity to help them with­out hav­ing been asked, and to dis­cover more about what is going on in the mar­ket in the process.

RSS has so many uses, and using a feed reader like Google Reader, Blog­lines, or oth­ers can save you valu­able time and deliver impor­tant infor­ma­tion to you that would have oth­er­wise been missed.  Give this LinkedIn tip a try and see if you feel more con­nected to your net­work.  I hope this helps.