TheMadPeacock On The Sofa

I am a big believer in using technology like LinkedIn and Plaxo to help drive sales.

Over at LinkedIn they have released (in Beta) a very powerful new section that I have been encouraging my team to use and thought I would also share here. This feature is in Beta so is constantly evolving and new features are being added so if by the time you reed this it has changes please let me know, I will try to reflect the updates..

Company Profiles are cool new pages that take all the information LinkedIn has (submitted by your employees in their personal profiles) and aggregates it up into a profile for your company.

So how can this be used to drive your business? EA Mythic is one of our public customers and they are very happy with Gamebryo… so lets use them as an example:

Strong referrals - I have used linkedIn for a long time to help me leverage my happy customers. With the Related Companies section of the EA Mythic profile I have now got an even more powerful tool to do that. I can see that I should be talking to Sony, AOL, Perpetual, WOTC, Red Fly and others..
When I go into these accounts I can refer them to EA Mythic to substantiate my claims of “best game engine in the industry” I don’t even have to give them specific (pre-arranged) names to call, I can just say, I know you have friends in EA Mythic, call any of them and get their input! VERY POWERFUL!

Building my customer network - Using the Mythic Employees section I see that even though they are relatively heavy users of LinkedIn I am not directly connected to anyone.. as account manager I must/should have people I am friendly with within the account.. time to start inviting my Mythic friends to link.
Tracking changes in my account - I can learn a lot about their projects and company direction by looking at who they are hiring and where they are hiring from.

Movement within - In every account, even the happiest accounts there are people who think writing games engines is the real mission of a game company and others who think that designing and building great games is the mission. It is always good to track who is moving up in the account, if there is a new player do I know them? if not when can I next get in there and get to know them.

Tracking the influencers - people who’s profiles are popular are often the people who have blogs, speak often at events or are generally well networked in the industry.. good people to know.

A word of caution - like any good thing LinkedIn can be abused and if it is you will find yourself loosing contacts. Remember to always respect peoples privacy and time.

You can read more about the new Company Profile pages on the LinkedIn Blog, Product Manager Maisy Samuelson has a post and video worth watching.