Nov. 6 MarketingMasters Luncheon Seminar

LinkedIn: A Collaborative Nexus for B-to-B Marketers

Whether you’re a member or active user or not, find out why so many b-to-b marketers are when LinkedIn’s Patrick Crane keynotes BMA’s MarketingMasters luncheon seminar on Thursday, Nov. 6, at The Standard Club.

Crane, LinkedIn’s vice president of marketing, will explain why the online business and professional networking site is achieving staggering growth by helping professionals around the world and their companies succeed.

“The fact is, business gets done through relationships. And it’s not just the people you know, it’s the people that they know,” Crane said last month in a podcast titled “LinkedIn Unplugged” on the Podcast Network’s “Connections” show. “That really is how the business world goes round. But [before LinkedIn] there really wasn’t a system that could actually make that real and make that actionable for people.”

You can view this podcast by going here and clicking on the “Networking on the Net” icon on the far right.

Crane said it was Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s chairman and founder, who set out to create a system where professionals could find one another, conduct research, get advice and more. “He figured that if you interconnect the professional world in a more efficient way, then business could actually speed up and people could be more effective and successful at what they do.”

So far, Hoffman’s hunches have proved correct. About a year ago, LinkedIn had 80 employees. Today it has 350. The site currently has about 29 million registered users, with more than a million members joining each month—voluntarily uploading their profiles, much like people voluntarily upload videos on YouTube. At this torrid growth pace, LinkedIn expects to have as many as 35 million users by the end of this year and 70 million by the end of 2009.

According to Crane, LinkedIn has now spread to 150 countries and encompasses some 160 industries, with some C-level membership in every Fortune 500 company. Average member age is 41, and average household income is $109,000. LinkedIn counts Google’s Vint Cerf, Dell’s Michael Dell, John McCain and Barack Obama among its members. What’s more, there are now more than 100,000 professional groups, including BMA’s (with, last count, 139 members) on LinkedIn that members can join.

While well established but still growing rapidly in the U.S. and Europe, LinkedIn is just getting started elsewhere. Earlier this year the company launched a Spanish-language version, and Crane said LinkedIn plans to launch in many more languages over the next 12 months.

What’s driving the success? LinkedIn’s members are interested in furthering their own careers or expanding the reach of their companies, Crane said, while the users of sites like Facebook and MySpace are more interested in social conversations and entertainment. What distinguishes LinkedIn, he added, is that it provides its members with the ability to help each other in their quests to achieve results.

“It is as much about helping other people as it is about getting value from the system yourself,” Crane noted in the podcast interview. “Reid [Hoffman] calls this concept ‘the small good,’ meaning you could invest 45 seconds of your time…. writing someone a recommendation or making an introduction. It might have been a small effort for you, but it could have a profound impact for those people. And that’s the concept of the small good. If everybody behaves that way, then the business world becomes a better place.”

Please note that BMA has rescheduled its luncheon seminars this year to occur on the first Thursday of the month instead of the third Thursday.

To register for the Nov. 6 luncheon, go here, email Marla Schrager or call her at 312-943-8040.

About Patrick Crane

Patrick Crane is vice president of marketing at LinkedIn, where he is responsible for leading the development of the LinkedIn brand, market development strategies, customer relationship management, public relations, marketing partnerships and promotions.

Before joining LinkedIn in July 2007, Crane was vice president of marketing for the Yahoo! Network Division. At Yahoo! he was responsible for taking Yahoo! Answers to market in 2005 and for marketing the product to its position today as the No. 1 Q&A site on the Web. He also led the marketing of Yahoo! Mail, helping it become the world’s top Web mail provider in 2006, as measured by comScore.

Prior to joining Yahoo! in 2003, Crane spent eight years at Vodafone Group plc, a global mobile telecom company, most recently as marketing director for Vodafone U.S. Before that he held marketing manager positions at Vodafone U.K. and Vodafone Australia, where he launched Australia and New Zealand’s first wireless Internet portal, extending some of the services into the Japanese market.

He is a graduate of the University of Huddersfield and Henley Management College, both located in the United Kingdom.

About Burt Helm

Burt Helm is the marketing department editor for BusinessWeek, responsible for coverage of the marketing industry and Starbucks. He joined BusinessWeek in September 2004 as a staff writer for BusinessWeek.com, covering technology, science and digital media for the Web site. Previously, Burt held positions at Inc. Magazine and Maxim. He is a graduate of Yale University, holding degrees in both English and physics.