Jinfo: Building a rapport with LinkedIn

Building a rapport with LinkedIn
Jinfo Blog

13th February 2012

Abstract

Rumours had been circulating for a while that LinkedIn, the most popular professional social network in the world, was planning to purchase Rapportive a browser plugin for Gmail. Now it would appear that the deal has been done and LinkedIn has acquired Rapportive for a sum believed to be between $10 and $15 million.

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Rumours had been circulating for a while that LinkedIn, the most popular professional social network in the world, was planning to purchase Rapportive, a browser plugin for Gmail. Now it would appear that the deal has been done and LinkedIn has acquired Rapportive for a sum believed to be between $10 and $15 million.

Rapportive is a browser plugin that sits within the Gmail sidebar. When an individual reads an email from someone or starts to compose an email, Rapportive displays a bio for that individual. The bio will include information from their LinkedIn profile, their latest tweets, a link to their Facebook account, links to any blogs they might maintain and links to other social networks they're registered with including Flickr and Quora. This is immensely useful if you want to find out more about an individual before you've replied to their email. Rapportive is also useful if someone has a very common surname like Smith and you're having some issues identifying who they are on LinkedIn. In this sense Rapportive is essentially a Customer or Contact Relationship Management (CRM) tool. If you've installed Rapportive then you'll understand how powerful it is. If you haven't I strongly recommend you do so.

It's too early to tell what the implications of this purchase are, but on the surface it looks like a good move by LinkedIn. LinkedIn already provides its users with lots of tools with which to integrate content created on other social networking sites including feeds from users’ Twitter accounts and blogs. Incorporating Rapportive within LinkedIn would to some extent automate this process and provide users with a snapshot of a connection, or a potential connection, and their activities across a whole suite of social networking applications. Another interesting development in January 2011 was LinkedIn's purchase of Cardmunch. Cardmunch is a free iPhone app that when installed enables users to take a photo of a business card with their iPhone.

The business card is converted into a contact on the user's iPhone with the LinkedIn profile of the new contact displayed. Connections users have in common are also shown. If an individual wishes to connect on LinkedIn to this new contact, they can do so either by using the LinkedIn profile information provided or by contacting a user they have in common.

Another acquisition by LinkedIn late last year was Connected. Connected is a contacts relationship manager which pulled together contacts from Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in one place. These acquisitions point towards LinkedIn becoming a CRM tool. LinkedIn would then become the place for an individual to see a contacts’ activity across a whole host of social networking sites and to comment and engage with that contact.

It will certainly be interesting to see what LinkedIn does with these two applications.

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