LinkedIn continues to be the new face of Professional Networking. The buzz in Social Networking is still inclinated towards Facebook and twitter. However LinkedIn has come up
aggressively in the networking segment by enabling more applications in their user
interface.

If you are into Corporate B-2-B marketing and communications, and planning to venture into social Media, LinkedIn would be my first choice. The reason being its
transparency. You can know who the other person is based on his profile, and
can find out more information about a company. Even better the Discussion forums
helps us to exchange and discuss topics, news and trends happening around in an
industry or in general.

Here are some observations, why using LinkedIn Groups can be a win-win situation in generating brand
recognition and even help you in delivering higher lead- gen opportunity to
your Organization.

1. Higher Privacy Features: - LinkedIn unlike Facebook is enabled with a higher privacy feature, which
   if enabled cannot be picked up by Search engines. As a side note, one thing we notice is that we can
   keep our groups private, by which the number of people who join remains a
   manageable size and we can control who joins the group.

2. RSS Feeds- LinkedIn has an option for aggregating the RSS feeds into your mail. This
   helps us in picking up feeds as and when they appear on the group. You can
   even subscribe to relevant groups, profiles to create and engage in
   forums, discussions. This helps in creating a higher credibility to yourself
   and your brand as you are actively participating in it. Chances of you
   getting recruited are
   also quite high as companies want innovative answers, and yours might be
   the one they are looking for.

3. Active Discussions: - Part of LinkedIn groups feature is the discussion session, which allows
   you to discuss on any new features, product updates, inputs etc wherein
   even the audience actively participate. Through this, we can learn and
   implement changes which we feel are necessary. The only catch here is “Don’t try to manage too much of the conversation or
   people will stop contributing.”

4. Company Profile: - While you are actively engaging in LinkedIn in discussions, also check out
   your Company and Competitor profile pages in it. There is an enormous amount of data, people can
   find on this page and someone needs to constantly update and validate it.
   Let’s accept the fact that LinkedIn becomes the Online Brand Face of your
   company.