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.

Google Docs Shifts Gears

This post is about Google Gears and Google Docs. I will get to that, but first a question. Do you have a Google Account? If not, get one. It takes about 2 minutes to set up, and allows you to take advantage of so many wonderful, free tools - one of which is Google Docs. What is Google Docs? It is basically all the good stuff from Microsoft Office (Word / Excel / PowerPoint) with a few big differences. Instead of buying the sofware, you just log on to the internet and use it. There is no installation - although you should install Firefox as a web browser if you use Internet Explorer. It is also free. Beyond the price, why would you want this? First, you can access your documents from anywhere that you can access the internet. No problems with storage, with lost documents, computer crashes, viruses, updates, or any of the other hassles you are used to paying for with Office. Further, you can share your documents with others in real time. That means that you and someone else can look at the same document at the same time - truly collaborating to make work easier. If someone makes updates, you can view the most updated version when you access the document as well as every change that was made since the last time you viewed it. It is truly amazing… and now it just got better thanks to Google Gears.
Google Gears allows things that work on the web to work on your desktop. It now works with Google Docs. This eliminates the key weakness that existed with Google Docs, which was “what if I can’t get on the internet?” So now you can use Google Docs just like you would use Office. Once you access the internet, everything updates automatically. It is just that easy.
Even if you still need to use Office for work, Google Docs is a great solution because you can upload Microsoft documents into it and export Google Docs back out into Microsoft Office formats. It is really an amazingly powerful tool and a great example of Software as a Service in action. How much longer will we pay for things like Word and Excel, when you can get equivalent programs for free? How much longer will you pay for servers, storage, and maintenance when you can get it free? The future of technology is web based. Create a Google Account and begin to find out why. Attached is a link to a page from one of Google’s many blogs. It outlines applications that currently work with Google Gears. This list will be expanding quickly, but already has several amazing (and free) tools. Give it a look. Get a Google Account. Download Firefox. Learn about RSS. Enjoy. Enough of my rambling… for now.

List of Web Applications That Use Google Gears