By now, you know that I love when challenging a preconceived notion or showing that a tool can be used for more than you might think on first glance. Those ah ha moments tickle me, so I am hoping that you’ll have one of those moments today as I explain the newest features on LinkedIn.

Normally, LinkedIn is seen as a business and networking tool, often a way to get a job or pass your resume around. It certainly doesn’t have the social networking reputation that Twitter and Facebook have developed. But with changes to the site itself, the high-income demographic that uses this site, and some entrepreneurs coming forward to prove that it does drive significant traffic to their blogs, there is now evidence to show that LinkedIn can, in the words of Chris Crum, “bring a different brand of relevance to the table.”

Here are some of the newest changes to LinkedIn:

- Users have the ability to control who sees what they are sharing, either by individual, groups, or connections.
- Facebook has proven that images and article excerpts increase traffic to a linked site or discussion, and LinkedIn now has this capability too. According to LinkedIn, “The chances of someone clicking through your shared article are greater when you’ve images and brief excerpts pulled from the news article or blog post.” Plus, you can customize it completely.
- Users can now see, edit, and delete their status updates.
- Re-sharing content has become pretty common on social sites, and Twitter even has a term for it: retweeting. LinkedIn now allows its users to share content with the click of a button. This is a perfect tool for “making content go viral”.
- Off-site sharing has been improved, so that content sites can “offer a similar sharing process for LinkedIn to its own internal re-share feature”. You can share directly to LinkedIn when you find something that intrigues you from a popular news site or a great blog post.
- LinkedIn has implemented a URL shortener (Lnkd.in).
- When posting an article, users now give credit to the source they got it from by employing a “via-style” credit.

- Keeping your profile in the eye of an audience who will help drive traffic to your business is important. Now, when you choose to make shared items

News in the world of internet marketing is filled with talk about Google’s latest venture: Google Buzz. Although I’ve heard a few negative remarks about how Google is trying to have their hand in every internet venue imaginable, word on the street is generally a tone that is interested in this development. I’m not surprised at that combination, since we all love to have the things we want to do on our computers and on the internet packaged up nice and neat, but then we tend to complain when one company provides it. Finding a happy medium in that situation is a bit of a quandary.

After reading about the features promised in Buzz, I am eager to try it out and see what I think of the experience it provides. Let’s take a quick look at some of the features of Buzz:

- Runs through Gmail
- Permits users to post status updates, photos, and links to their network
- Allows users to pull in activity from other sites, including Twitter, Flickr and Picasa
- Will have a mobile component, which can combine with wireless operating systems to include features like voice-recognition postings and a GPS-enabled ability to attach the user’s location to posts
- Enables real time comments, weighting the comments by other users similarly to Google’s search engine results in order to sort through them in a similar fashion to your Google search
- Automatically sets the people you email or chat with frequently as your friends

Despite how Buzz seems to be trying to replace some social networking sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn, while integrating other sites, like Twitter, into the usability of their latest brainchild, Google claims that they aren’t trying to edge in on anyone else’s territory and are just trying “to listen to their users”, according to Gmail product managed Todd Jackson. However, there is talk of Buzz being marketed to companies as an interoffice communication tool, which is definitely a competitive move against AOL Instant Messenger service.

Only time will tell if Buzz will be a success and to what degree. The success may hinge not on what Buzz can do at this moment, but on the potential expansions – from updating your status by phone to enabling Twitter updates through your Buzz account to linking Buzz to other emerging Google tools – and the reception Google receives in the social media arena. And the good news is that Google knows they have their work cut out for them. Spokesman Bradley Horowitz said, “We’re not launching this today because we think we’re done. We don’t think that’s how a product like this is built.”

It’s going to be interesting to watch the progress of this tool and see what kind of audience it ends up getting.

The big trend in electronics and software is flexibility. We all want our gadgets and our programs to do as much as possible, as easily as possible. Since the death of Windows 3.1 and single use computing morphing into a multi-use experience, we want our laptops to run music, download email, check the weather, and help us to write the next report all at the same time. Instead of logging into Twitter proper to post your tweets, there are programs that allow you to send off tweets via third parties, so you don’t have to go to the trouble of logging in and out several times a day.

Social media is all about connections, but as our abilities with our social media programs grow, so do the demands on networking sites to get bigger and better. Those who do not grow may not survive in this market and mindset. Our electronic consciousness demands solutions to our problems, whether they are perceived problems or real ones.

LinkedIn is responding to this mindset and positioning itself to be seen as an innovative service by allowing its users to edit their profile layouts. It probably seems like such a basic step to make to most of us, but the article “LinkedIn Allows Users to Edit Profile Layouts” points out, “most people like having a measure of control” and LinkedIn is smart to cater to that desire.

What does editing your profile layout mean anyway? Well, if you’ve ever had a resume to write that had a special case, like a stay-at-home parent who is returning to the workforce, a career change, a layoff, or even just inexperience, you’ll know that sometimes putting the right information front and center can make the difference. In this case, having tabs that can be dragged and reordered in LinkedIn allows you to do the same thing as reordering your resume. In the resume writing field, people pay substantial cash for a professional to do just this for them. Now you can just click and drag a heading to accomplish the same thing.

According to Aaron Bronzan, an associate product manager at LinkedIn, this change is “just the first of a huge number of enhancements that are coming to your LinkedIn profile in the upcoming months.” Which means that LinkedIn users and social networking gurus will be waiting and watching for changes in the next while.

You wouldn’t send a flawed resume out into the world to represent you, so it makes sense to demand the most from your online networking tools, be they social or professional. It’s good to see LinkedIn stepping up and making changes to ensure that their users are getting better representation.