Individuals, job seekers, recruiters and sales people have long known the power of LinkedIn.  Finding a networking connection can lead to a number of opportunities and it’s much easier to get a ‘warm’ introduction through LinkedIn than it is by calling the company receptionist.  But for years now, when sales people have been asked about what they use for tools, their replay has been “Product X” and LinkedIn.  LinkedIn has always been there, but it’s always been…over there.  It’s a separate browser window that people have open that they ALT-Tab over to when they need to find some more details about a person or company.

LinkedIn, launched just 6 short years ago in 2003, has quickly become the standard for professional networking on the web.  With over 50 million users, the days are gone when the best connection you had was a 4th or 5th degree connection.  It seems that everyone is connected to everyone.  Even Kevin Bacon has a LinkedIn account now making it all too easy to see if you’re within 6 degrees of separation of Kevin Bacon.

However, until recently, LinkedIn has stayed on the sidelines of the Web 2.0 world.  Sure they could be considered a Social Media site for business, but aside from a few proprietary integrations (Salesforce and Outlook among them) the tight integrations into workflow solutions was missing.  People still used LinkedIn.com to find information and networks, instead of using it within their lead generation tools.

All that changed in November with the release of the LinkedIn Developers’ Network in November.  Although the company had been dealing with some partners prior to the announcement, (OneSource was among them) the Developer’s Network opens up the doors for everyone.  And not surprisingly, there’s been a few notable integrations announced already.  TweetDeck announced their integration in late November and they’ve created an easy way to tie in Tweet’s from your network to the LinkedIn updates.  Twitter itself recently launched a connection to LinkedIn so that the status updates on LinkedIn can be easily updated across Twitter (which then can then carry over to Facebook).

What does this mean for salespeople?  It means that you can expect to see a tighter level of connectivity between the tools that you use and LinkedIn.  Which will hopefully mean warmer leads and more efficient tools to use across your company.  Now that’s a New Year’s Resolution worth keeping!