The New LinkedIn Profile Organizer: Worth the Upgrade?

• Tweet

• Tweet
• Buffer

Official LinkedIn Profile Organizer Photo from LinkedIn.com

If you are still using the free version of LinkedIn, you may have been curious about the new LinkedIn Profile Organizer.  I received the same email that all of you LinkedIn users probably did advertising this as a new killer functionality.  The timing of the announcement is interesting in that it happened almost one year after LinkedIn Applications were introduced.  Come to think of it, this is the first new major functionality that LinkedIn has introduced in a year [and as I write this LinkedIn just made a significant upgrade in their user interface, so this may have been what they invested their resources in: usability].  Was LinkedIn Profile Organizer worth the wait?  And is it worth the money?

The LinkedIn Profile Organizer is an incredibly simple user interface that appears in the left-hand navigation bar under Contacts.  The idea is, as the title implies, you can organize any profile that you see on LinkedIn by saving their profile into a folder.  Once saved, you can add notes and contact details to the profile.  And you can create several folders (either 5 or 25 depending on how much you pay) to organize these profiles.  You can do this for any profile on LinkedIn, regardless if they are 1st degree connections or not.

So let’s put this in perspective.  If you are connected to someone, you already have the ability to see their contact details as well as display notes in the “Contact Information” module that displays in the right-hand side of a 1st degree connected profile.  True, with LinkedIn Profile Organizer, you can put the profiles in folders, but apparently you can already tag and organize your contacts to some degree in the beta version of the Contacts Application (which, by the way, I still do not have access to) which should appear when you press “Contacts” on the left-hand navigation bar.

So where, you ask, is the value in the Profile Organizer?  The ability to organize profiles and write notes on those profiles that you are not connected to. But why would you want to do this in the first place?

LinkedIn prides itself on being a network of “trusted professionals,” so the whole premise is that you are already connected to anyone that you would want to save a profile of.  This means that the new LinkedIn Profile Organizer offers little if any value to the average LinkedIn user who is connected to the people that they would want to keep tabs on.  Who would find value in it, then?

Let’s first look at why someone would upgrade for a paid LinkedIn account in the first place, regardless of the new LinkedIn Profile Organizer.  If you are a recruiter, you probably have already upgraded for the sole purpose that you can get more search results and be able to send InMails.  This combination helps you save time and also increases your chance of contacting a stranger that you may not have access to.  The same thing could be said for someone in sales who is using LinkedIn to prospect.

“Prospecting” is the magic word here, because once you start the LinkedIn Profile Organizer, a folder named “Top Prospects” already appears.  And this is the only value that this new functionality may provide: the ability to organize “prospects” of those that you are not and do not intend to connect with.

My final analysis is that the LinkedIn Profile Organizer was developed for the same people that have already upgraded to a paid account: recruiters and sales executives.  It is a “sticky” service that will help them organize their online prospecting activities and keep them on longer as paying customers.

For the rest of us, I see no need to upgrade.  But you’ll have to be the final judge of that.  LinkedIn is offering everyone a 30-day free trial.  Take advantage of it and give it a test spin.  Let me know if I was right or wrong on this one.

By the way, in case you haven’t seen it, here is the official video from the LinkedIn home page.

Related articles by Zemanta

• LinkedIn Launches Profile Bookmarking (readwriteweb.com)
• LinkedIn Launches Profile Organizer, Enters Salesforce Territory (mashable.com)