Why LinkedIn’s Acquisition of Lynda Is A Big Deal
On Thursday, April 9, professional networking site LinkedIn acquired the online learning platform, Lynda, for $1.5 billion.
That’s a big deal for obvious reasons, but also for a few, more subtle, reasons. Let’s take a closer look at the direction the company.
LinkedIn seeks to understand job titles, rather than simply listing them.
Those little recommendation boxes that show up on the site, asking you to endorse your connections on skills aren’t just artfully placed to boost your profile. LinkedIn is using this data to better define what role a job title plays with a company. This isn’t just a clever use of data; this can help in suggesting job candidates based on much more than the job title of their previous place of employment.
LinkedIn acquires Newsle
Newsle is a web app that notifies you when your friends are in the news. This is interesting, because it doesn’t go a long way with high school and college students, who rarely garter media attention on that level, but it could prove an invaluable tool in reaching out and congratulating a coworker or potential employer on their recent success.
It’s also a step beyond the bite sized updates on your connections’ career progress, often in the form of the notorious humblebrag, offering an objective benchmark for who walks the walk within your network.
Slideshare joins LinkedIn
Another B2B behemoth (and a college students best friend for presentation day) that was acquired by LinkedIn is Slideshare. Slideshare is one of the most underrated social networks in that it contains a wealth of carefully thought out, user generated content, but it isn’t the type of platform that is visited daily. Still, LinkedIn saw the value in Slideshare to the tune of $119M.
Presentations are the lifeblood of companies, making up the majority of internal communications and external communications when interfacing with clients.
What is LinkedIn After?
So fastforward to today and LinkedIn’s puzzle stops looking like all the pieces could be the sky and starts looking a lot like vertical integration. LinkedIn is poised to dominate professional communication by owning the channels by which professional skills are verified, analyzing those skills to identify optimal candidates (which also ties into another acquisition, Bright), dominating business casual and business professional interfacing through their native platform, as well as Slideshare, and cannibalizing a content strategy through news aggregation with services like Newsle and Pulse.
If you’re interested in founding a company, now might be a good time to focus on professional communication; it might position you well to be acquired by LinkedIn.
