LinkedIn as a media company?

Eliza Kern (@elizakern) of GigaOm wrote yesterday that data is the reason LinkedIn wants to be a media company.

Talent Solutions (recruiting) and premium subscriptions make up almost 80% of LinkedIn’s revenue, so why the desire to grow the content areas such as LinkedIn Today (curated news) and Influencers (thought leader blog posts)? To grow the user base and traffic, says Kern.

With more traffic and users comes more interaction. That interaction provides data upon which to to serve up better information and context to users networking on LinkedIn and companies using LinkedIn to find talent.

LinkedIn Today has been around since 2011. Despite it being a powerful listening tool to follow news and information generally, and in your niche, I don’t hear of it being used widely. Especially by legal professionals, which no doubt could benefit from the simplicity of LinkedIn Today, as compared to RSS news readers. Influencers, launched just six months, is more interesting to me. Last week I noticed posts from Influencers in my RSS feeds via words and phrases I was following on Google Alerts. By using Influencers as a platform for publishing content that may be consumed on LinkedIn and on our personal readers (RSS Readers, Flipboard, Zite), LinkedIn and its users benefit from social media as a whole. LinkedIn also generates a lot more interaction–and thus data.

A number of years ago an executive at ALM (largest legal periodical publisher) told me one of the greatest assets the company had was a data base of lawyers and legal professionals. Using this data base to see what users read or shared, ALM could share valuable information with advertisers, their greatest source of revenue. ALM thus wanted more and more media across which to drive eyeballs and interaction.

LinkedIn will of course have advertising, but it’s the underlying solutions it will offer professionals and companies who are networking and recruiting from which LinkedIn can derive greater revenues. And it’s the data created from media that will increase the value of these offerings to paying users.

For lawyers and law firms you should expect LinkedIn to increase and improve the ways you can syndicate content, publish content, and interact with other’s content.

Just as on Facebook, it’s the content (media) which drives interaction and the quality of our relationships, it’ll be the same with LinkedIn, a network dominated by professionals and companies. A network on which lawyers and law firms feel more comfortable.