Use RSS to Get More from LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great tool for keep­ing track of your con­tacts, research­ing indi­vid­u­als and orga­ni­za­tions, find­ing employ­ment and employ­ees, ask­ing ques­tions and get­ting answers, and bet­ter under­stand­ing the pro­fes­sional world. As you add fol­low­ers, it can be a bit of a chal­lenge to keep up with every­thing. Sure you can check out the weekly sum­mary email of activ­ity in your net­work, and you can peri­od­i­cally scan your home page to see what your con­nec­tions are up to, but these meth­ods are lim­ited in their abil­ity to pro­vide you rich and use­ful infor­ma­tion when you need it.

One way to over­come this prob­lem is by using RSS to sub­scribe to the changes to your net­work with a ser­vice like Google Reader. By doing this you cre­ate an ongo­ing, search­able stream of data about every­one in your net­work. Because Google Reader allows you to archive old posts and eas­ily search through them later, you can build a repos­i­tory of data, day by day and update by update that is always at your fingertips.

I use this in 2 ways. The first is to scan through the lat­est updates in my RSS reader every few days to see who has moved where, who has been pro­moted, who is forg­ing new rela­tion­ships with whom, and which of the thou­sands of updates might be impor­tant for me to fol­low up on.  That might be a phone call, thank you note, email, or just some thought as to what might be hap­pen­ing in the world around me.  All good stuff.  The prob­lem is that all too often I get busy, can’t check this for a few days, and the num­ber of unread updates gets into the thou­sands.  At that point it becomes tough to really give this infor­ma­tion the due dili­gence it requires, which leads me to the sec­ond way you can use this. 

Once you have read these items in Google Reader, they dis­ap­pear from your unread items, but they still remain stored in your reader.  Thus, this becomes really use­ful if you want to search for infor­ma­tion about a spe­cific per­son or busi­ness in your net­work.  Sim­ply enter their name in the search box in Google Reader and up pops every update, sta­tus update, activ­ity, and con­nec­tion this per­son has made since join­ing your net­work.  Not only that, but it can com­bine it with other places where they have appeared in your RSS reader — like blog posts or Twit­ter men­tions if you track them. 

So if you are call­ing on that impor­tant client, you still want to visit their page to see the sta­tic back­ground infor­ma­tion.  That will tell you all about their past his­tory, their con­nec­tions, and their employer.  How­ever if you want to learn more about what they are “doing” then you can use this method to bet­ter inform yourself. 

Again each of these updates is sim­ply data.  Your abil­ity to aggre­gate it and then do some­thing with it changes it to infor­ma­tion.  Under­stand­ing all this is akin to knowl­edge and actu­ally fol­low­ing through with it is more like wis­dom.  I encour­age you to make wise use of your time by using this tip to bet­ter under­stand and help the peo­ple you serve.

What tricks are you using to get more out of LinkedIn?