Last week I shared with you how to sync up your Twitter and Linkedin profiles to help promote your personal brand. This week I will take a look at Linkedin and their announcement to open the Linkedin platform, what this means for your personal brand, and the evolution of the Personal Branding Cloud.
Excerpt from the Linkedin Developer Network:
Let your users bring their professional networks with them to your service. You’ll be able to extend your site or application to:
- Provide a better experience: Build better experiences on your site by understanding the professional profiles and connections of your users.
- Increase productive engagement: When your users have access to profiles and their professional network, they are more productive researching people, sharing content, seeing who they know in any group, seeing updates from their network relevant to the task at hand, just to name a few opportunities.
- Increase your reach: Let your users share the good work they do on your site with their LinkedIn network. You’ll get exposure and they’ll build their professional identities.
All this means is that Linkedin has opened up their platform to software developers all over the world. Now, as previously with Facebook and Twitter, software developers can create all sorts of cool applications that will benefit all types of end users.
The year of the cloud
The most interesting aspect of this is that personal brands all over the world are moving into the cloud. I’m saying it here first — the year 2010 will be the year of the Personal Branding Cloud.
As more of our lives move online and we share more content, software developers will be finding ways to make sense of this information. They will create applications that help personal brands spread further, faster then ever before.
For the personal branders that have taken the time to create their unique personal brand, it will create many new opportunities.
For those who have not created there personal brand yet, it is time to start.
“Software is moving to the cloud, and business applications need context for who people are and how they are related. LinkedIn now is the obvious choice as a provider for those services. It is hard to imagine a business application that would not benefit from LinkedIn integration.”
– Roger Neal, SVP/GM at BusinessWeek Digital, McGraw-Hill
One of the first innovations released from the Linkedin Developer Network is the integration of Linkedin with TweetDeck. Now you will be able to receive Linkedin status updates and easy access to Linkedin profiles right from the TweetDeck platform.
And if you missed it last week now your personal brand will follow you to the office — even if you do not want it to. The social network has been brought to the enterprise with a new platform by Salesforce.com called Chatter.
Excerpt:
“Salesforce Chatter will completely transform the way you collaborate with people in your company. As both a collaboration application and a platform for building social cloud-computing apps, Chatter helps you connect and share information securely like never before—all in real time. Welcome to the new world of collaboration for the enterprise.”
Even Microsoft Outlook is going to be able to sync with Linkedin in the very near future.
Connection platforms rise
Look for more applications, use cases and innovation in the coming months.
There is a shift taking place now in the world — everything is moving into the cloud. You need to be there too.
You can do this by simply creating your personal brand and taking the time to monitor it and stay disciplined enough to keep promoting it as your expertise grows.
The year 2010 will be filled with many opportunities — many of them will be found in the Personal Branding Cloud.
