Social networking site LinkedIn is one of the few firms benefiting from the recession. The most obvious metric? Membership, which, at 34 million, is up from 8 million just two years ago. And as unemployment looms, LinkedIn users are apparently ramping up their networking efforts — the number of member recommendations on the site reportedly surged 14 percent between September and January.
Amid the flurry of activity, it becomes vital for the site to uphold its reputation as the social networking destination of choice for businesspeople. In addition to opportunities for recruitment and human resources, investors and partners are beginning to take notice as well — and beginning to connect to the CRM scene. In late October, SAP revealed it was part of a group that had made a $22.7 million investment in LinkedIn, but only had general comments on its plan for the stake: “LinkedIn is one of the leading Internet companies in the world that targets business users,” said an SAP spokesperson. “When Web 2.0 technologies are smartly applied to the enterprise, they can produce significant efficiencies for small, medium, and large companies, and we believe in LinkedIn’s pioneering approach.”
SAP’s not alone in seeing operational value. BusinessWeek, for example, is one of several media outlets tied into LinkedIn content. Thanks to one of what LinkedIn calls its “Intelligence Applications,” when a visitor to the magazine’s Web site hovers over a company name within a story, a list of her LinkedIn contacts at that company comes into view. In addition to Intelligence Applications, LinkedIn now offers 10 third-party applications on its site since opening up its application programming interface (API) in October.
Brad Shimmin, research analyst with Current Analysis, says that opening up the API will help LinkedIn in its retention efforts, thanks to an expanding breadth of usage — and…