LinkedIn raised $22.7 million and their new investors include enterprise systems company SAP and publisher McGraw-Hill.
Strategic reasons? (just guessing)
An enterprise system company like SAP can port LinkedIn’s personal profile data, networks and network communications within the enterprise system. This automates the user experience so they may continue to work on LinkedIn, and have SAP capture this work. That’s only the first step; SAP and other enterprise systems will likely find ways to port bookmarking applications like Delicious and micro-blogging applications like Twitter or Yammer. They would use feed-based aggregation to port these data into their systems until they start looking like “Enterprise Facebook or Friendfeed“.
A publishing company like McGrawHill could leverage LinkedIn profile information to provide context to their articles in their magazines like Business Week. For example, LinkedIn could provide a “opt-in” on user profiles that allows publishers like Business Week to link quoted personage to their LinkedIn profile. Example: Pat Kitano says “blah blah”… LinkedIn would become the online Who’s Who, as well as a Who knows Who.
This would seem to make more sense. More traditional mainstream companies wanting to partner with those who are vested in social media. LinkedIn has a membership that is more tailored to traditional corporate America. Both sides could obviously benefit....
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