Discovering the LinkedIn Toolbar for Microsoft Outlook!
LinkedIn is a highly interesting & established business networking online social network which has been around for some time. In a couple of years LinkedIn has been able to attract over 45 million business professionals from a variety of industries to this modern way of online networking and relationship building activities. Whether used for business development, advice from experts in the field, keeping in contact with old colleagues or just part of a due diligence project for a company; LinkedIn is a source of tools which enables professionals to locate the right individuals to whom to ask the right questions.
It is really interesting to meet more and more people who are adopting LinkedIn as a way to extend their personal/company business card. I personally found LinkedIn to be great for keeping in contact with people I worked with; went to school & university with as well as other people I met professionally.
Over the past years, LinkedIn has also proven to be a ‘stop of choice’ when I am looking for opinions from experts in particular fields. Of course searches via Google and Bing as well as other sources remain a prime spot; but I noticed myself using LinkedIn more often as a ‘go to’ location from where to get opinions of people directly involved in the same research field.
As many, I live in the world of Microsoft Outlook where all of my contact management, communication, calendaring and more take place. Browsing the LinkedIn site I came across a great tool through which brings the LinkedIn power to my Microsoft Outlook environment enabling me to manage my LinkedIn network without needing to leave my Microsoft Outlook world! Great! – enter the LinkedIn Outlook Toolbar.
Once the toolbar is installed, a LinkedIn icon is added to your Outlook which not only enables you to learn more about your contact via a mini profile summary of the person who contacted you (including LinkedIn profile picture, job title, position in your network etc etc), but also enables you to easily invite people who are not already in your network with a single button click!.
Key advantages of using the LinkedIn Outlook Toolbar:
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Fastest and easiest way to send invitations to any contact you have not sent an invitation to connect with.
Goes through all of your existing contacts in Microsoft Outlook and enables easy viewing of which contacts you are not yet connected to, and would care to consider for connection based on frequency of email communications with these contacts. -
Dashboard view for easy notification when anyone in your network updates their profile.
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Continued tracking of email sending frequency as to recommend when to contact someone to add to your network.
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Contact Reminder Service: Shows you which contacts in your network you have not been in contact/communication in a while – very helpful to keep in touch with your network, emails that potentially need a reply as well as follow-up reminders.
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Grab functionality: Easy contact information updating by simply highlighting the contact information in the email body, and have it added to your outlook contact profile automatically!
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Easy access to the LinkedIn home page without leaving Microsoft Outlook.
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Free.
Key disadvantages of the LinkedIn Toolbar:
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For people with large amounts of email in their Outlook, the LinkedIn Toolbar searches for updates every time it builds the dashboard view. This performance hit in itself can be very annoying as it can take a good 5+ minutes to re-index the email, and if you are used to speedy results this is not one of those. Hopefully it will be updated in future versions as I do not see the need of rebuilding from scratch every time (or so the impression given is).
A demo of the LinkedIn Outlook toolbar in action is available here:
In this post – Part 1 – I touched base on the value propositions of using the LinkedIn Outlook Toolbar. In Part 2 I will focus on providing a visual step by step guide on how to locate, download and install the LinkedIn Outlook Toolbar.
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