At this week’s Integrated Marketing Summit in Denver, Colorado, I had the opportunity to sit down with Mike O’Neil and Lori Ruff, the authors of “Rock the World with Your Online Presence.” Both Mike and Lori speak and travel relentlessly teaching others how to supercharge their online presence.

I had the opportunity to read through their book on my flight back from Denver and came across a chapter that outlined some of the applications LinkedIn has made available on their platform. If you’re interested in supercharging your LinkedIn profile, you’ll want to incorporate some of these applications into your individual profiles or into any of the groups you manage.

Here are 13 LinkedIn applications you should know about, as outlined in “Rock the World with Your Online Presence.”

LinkedIn Events: If you find yourself involved with a lot of events, LinkedIn events is for you. It gives you the option to promote or advertise events to other LinkedIn users. “The product is still in development,” say Mike and Lori in their book. “But you should learn to use it now, so that as upgrades are made, you’ll be able to incorporate them into your regular routine more easily.”

SlideShare: This is one of the more popular applications that LinkedIn provides. If you haven’t checked out SlideShare, but sure to take a spin through the site. If you’re trying to position yourself as a though leader, you’ll want to upload your presentations to SlideShare so that people can see your thinking and incorporate your data into their own work (giving you credit where it’s due, of course). SlideShare also has a plug-in for Facebook.

Google Presentation: This is similar to SlideShare, Box and Huddle. According to Mike and Lori, “this application does not have the awesome Google power one might expect. However, there is one thing that it does have above and beyond all the rest: You can actually create a presentation in your LinkedIn account and insert video within it.”

Tripit: This application is designed mostly for business travelers. It lets you enter your travel schedule with a great level of detail (which requires you to visit the TripIt site directly). With this application, you can add connections and share travel information with them. This is really valuable when you want to keep abreast of the itineraries of business associates, or when you want to make plans to meet some of the connections you’ve made on LinkedIn as you travel to other cities.

Company BUZZ: This is a tool that lets you see what other people are saying about you, your company or your brand online. It grabs the information from the Twitter world and plunks it right down for you to check it out. In some ways, it’s similar to Google Alerts or TweetDeck.

Box.Net: You can use this application to share and collaborate on documents or PDFs. If you have a white paper, a brochure or some other document that you want to share, people can easily click on the document and download it right from within your LinkedIn profile or account.

Huddle Workspaces: This is an application that’s highly collaborative, just like Box.Net. They provide 1GB of space in the free package, which is more than enough room for most visitors. It also allows online editing of files, so you don’t have to have the standard word processing or spreadsheet applications on your computer.

WordPress: This is the world’s #1 blogging platform. If you have a WordPress blog and you’d like to incorporate it into your LInkedIn account, you can do so using this application. I use this application so that the 60 Second Marketer blog shows up on my personal LinkedIn page.

BlogLink Powered by TypePad: WordPress may the the world’s #1 platform, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other platforms, too. BlogLink supports TypePad, Moveable Type, Vox, Blogger, LiveJournal and many more.

ReadingLIst by Amazon: This is one of the more popular applications on LinkedIn. You can use it to put lists of books you’re reading (or simply recommending) to others. You can use it to promote business books that would be relevant to your business connections. Or you can use it to promote non-business books you’re reading, which helps give people a sense of who you are outside of the business world.

LinkedIn Polls: This can be a fun tool you can use to find out what people in your industry are thinking about and concerned about.  When people come to your profile and answer the poll question, they can see the results of the poll. “The poll can stay up as long as you like,” say Mike and Lori, “although it’s good housekeeping to change it every couple of months at the least.”

Tweets: Are you interested in including your Tweets in your LinkedIn profile? Then Tweets is for you. The interface is pretty straightforward, providing a snapshot of the Tweets of our followers or the Tweets of your main Twitter account. From both of these tabs, you can update your Twitter status.

SAP Community Bio: Huh? What’s this doing in here? It seems as though it’s an application that belongs on the island of misfit toys. That’s not a slam against SAP, which provides some amazing enterprise solution software. It’s just that this application — which caters to SAP developers, analysts, consultants and administrators — would appeal to a very narrow audience, unlike the other applications.

That sums up the 13 LinkedIn applications you can use to become a LinkedIn rock star. If you’re interested in taking a deep dive into LinkedIn, be sure to buy Mike and Lori’s book, “Rock the World with Your Online Presence.”

Posted by Jamie Turner, Chief Content Officer, the 60 Second Marketer, the online magazine of BKV Digital and Direct Response. Click here to download a free chapter from Jamie’s book “How to Make Money with Social Media” which will be published by the Financial Times Press this fall.

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010, 4:54 pm   |   LinkedIn, Social Media  |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback