LinkedIn To Leverage User Follows And Recommendations In New Social Ad Formats

Taking a page from Facebook’s ad formats, professional social network LinkedIn is launching new social ad formats today that will leverage members’ actions on the site to serve more targeted ads.

So if you follow a company, or recommend a product or company, LinkedIn will use this data in display ads to give you a more targeted advertisement. For example, LinkedIn could put up an ad for a Google job posting (sponsored by Google) that will show people in your network who work at Google and could refer you.

Another format could feature a display ad for a company, and LinkedIn will show how many of the network’s users have followed or recommended the company and/or its products.

LinkedIn will also track any information and actions taken through its plug-ins as well. Starting in August, LinkedIn says that you can opt-out of any information (such as impression data) that may be sent to LinkedIn via these plug-ins.

LinkedIn says the personalized LinkedIn Ads will start rolling out today to a small set of members as part of a limited release. Of course, privacy is always an issue when leveraging social data on networks. LinkedIn says that y name and image is never shared with any advertiser and you can choose to opt out of these personalized ads.

LinkedIn recently changed its privacy settings, which hinted that the company could be rolling out more Facebook-like ads in the near future. While some may find the ads invasive, serving highly-targeted, more interactive ads is better for the network ad dollars. It’s probably wise for LinkedIn to start thinking more like Facebook in terms of advertising.

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LinkedIn Connects With Fortune's Dan Roth

LinkedIn wants to become more than a networking site for professionals: It has ambitions to become a sort of media company, too.

Now it’s bringing in someone to help them pull that off. The service has hired Time Inc.’s Dan Roth, Fortune magazine’s digital editor.

LinkedIn has recently been promoting “LinkedIn Today,” its equivalent of Facebook’s news feed, which shows users stories that their friends/associates recommend. Roth’s first job will be to build up that service and its associated home page, and then move on to other projects, he says.

He’s the second high-profile Time Inc. editor to head out for a high-profile tech company this month. Josh Quittner, who had been one the key drivers in the publisher’s tablet media efforts, has left to join Flipboard, the high-profile iPad media aggregator.

Roth recently helped Fortune launch its own Web app, which features a deep integration with LinkedIn.

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Disclosure: I worked with Dan for a few months way back in the late 1990s, and he interviewed me when he wrote about my last employer a couple years ago. It’s a good read.

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