This post is the second in a series I am writing on how to leverage social media in your website. To learn about what is what for Facebook, check out my post called Leveraging Drupal in Facebook. As my business has focused on Drupal, some of this information is specific to Drupal, but much of it can be applied to any web application.
As we saw in Facebook, Linkedin offers multiple levels of depth for developers. Linkedin has not been as ambitious as Facebook, but they provide both simple and fast tools as well as deeply integratable, robust tools.
Linkedin's "Simple, Fast Tools"
As with Facebook, Linkedin provides a set of javascript based tools that they call "Widgets". Unlike Facebook, most of these widgets require some javascipt to be embedded in <head> section of your HTML. So, to use them, you will need your developer to modify your page template file to use them. This code can be made just once and the widgets will be available to users of the site. I'll walk you through the widgets available today.
Company Insider
This widget allows you to show visitors how they are connected, through their personal Linkedin accounts, to companies that you mention on your website. The widget comes in both a popup form or inline. My company is Connect2Market, Inc. Notice the small "in" icon. If you click on it, a popup is called that contains infomation on the referenced company and if your Linkedin connection to the company. So if you are connected to me on Linkedin, then you should see that in the popup. (One note, you have to have been previously logged in your Linkedin account with the browser you are using for it to work.) Linkedin also provides an inline version of the widget as well like this:
They are pretty easy once you get the hang of it.
One pain is that the widgets need to be in html and javascript and many popular rich text editors will strip out some of this code on you. So again, not as easy as it could be. Hopefully the Linkedin module under development (more on this later) will incorporate a tool to automate these widgets. You can read all the details and get the code here in their developer documentation.
Profile
Next up is the Profile widget. I can see where this widget would be useful to many clients right out of the gate. The profile shows a summary of the public profile information of a Linkedin user. It could be your own (or your client's) profile Tim Madden that you might put on an "about us" type page or could used for be for someone completely unconnected that you mention like Guy Kawasaki. In addition to having a popup form, you can also use an inline version like this:
This Profile widget only requires (besides the script required in the head) a regular link to be made to the linkedin public profile that uses has a special class assigned. This makes it much easier to implement and your rich text editor probably doesn't have to be your enemy on it. You can read all the details and get the code here in their developer documentation.
Share on Linkedin
The last of the widgets might be the fastest in that it only requires you to provide a specially formated html link. No javascript in the head section required. The downside is the link is pretty complicated and we only work if format correctly. They can be created by hand and are made out of just the url, title and summary of what you want to be shared. However, as they have to be URL encoded (things like spaces must be turned into \%20's), the process would best if automated by a module. Hopefully, we will see something soon in this area.
The benefit of this widget is visitors you have no connection to can share your page with their network with just the click of the link. You can read all the details and get the code here in their developer documentation.
Here is the Share on Linkedin link for this page. Go ahead, please click it - I'd appreciate the gesture!
Share "Leveraging Drupal in Linkedin" Article on Linkedin!
Those are the widgets and they each might be valuable in their own way. They are not rocket science by any means but also not anywhere near as easy of the fast and simple tools provided by Facebook.
Linkedin's "APIs"
Should you or your clients have a need to go beyond the widgets, Linkedin exposes a rich api that you can tap into from your application. The APIs allow you to both read data from inside Linkedin (including private data) as well as write data back into the accounts of Linkedin users you have authenicated. I'll talk about what is happening to implement the APIs in Drupal and walk you through a few of the things you can do with it.
The APIs in Drupal
At this point, you will find active development on going in the Linkedin Integration module project. Unfortunately, these are still early days in this development and no stable release has been published. Here are the supported API functions as described on the module's drupal page:
- Per-user OAuth authentication between LinkedIn and Drupal
- Post LinkedIn status from node edit form (like the Twitter module)
- Synchronise LinkedIn user profiles with a user profile tab in Drupal
I have implemented the module here on the Connect2market site and, so far, everything works as the developers intended (knock on wood!). I'll walk you through what each means now.
Authentication between Linkedin and Drupal
This allows a user to authenicate a connection between your application and their Linkedin account. This has to be done first for the rest of the API functions to work. One cool feature of the module is you can allow users to create new accounts using their Linkedin credendentials to authenicate. What does that mean? The function is similar to Facebook Connect. It means that your users don't have to remember their username and password to login to your website application AND you don't have to present them with a long and onerous form to fill out to find out who they are. Your application can just retrieve it from Linkedin. Pretty sweet if you ask me.
Post to Linkedin Status
This function is very handy if you (or your client's) website application posts content like a blog and you would like to the associated Linkedin account to have a status update posted with the title of the new content and its URL. It is simple and easy and works in the same manner as the Twitter module does. When activated for a content type, the module adds a checkbox on the edit form that allows you to have it pushed into Linkedin. They provide a field where you can customize the update to Linkedin. Simple and easy to use. I have implemented this function here and Connect2Market. Perhaps that is how you arrived here!
Synchronize Linkedin Profile data on your Drupal User page
As previously mentioned, you can use this function to pull the user's profile data from their Linkedin account into your applications data. There is a bug in the unreleased dev version of the module, so I cannot show you it working on Connect2Market. When it gets fixed, I'll turn it on for you to see. For many applications, the Profile widget may be all you need to use.
You can read all the details about the APIs here in their developer documentation.
That is about the extent of it currently. Clearly, we have some useful tools available today and I expect that the Drupal module side of things will mature rapidly this year.
Come back again soon and I will walk you through how to Leverage Drupal in Twitter.