LinkedIn recently gave group owners the option of making their content public so that all activity from that point on would be visible to search engines. One of LinkedIn’s little-known gems is Signal , a real-time search engine that’s listed as “Updates” on the search menu. Have you checked out LinkedIn lately? If you thought the world’s largest professional network was little more than a place to post your resume, you owe yourself another visit. LinkedIn gets none of the buzz of Facebook, and no one’s going to make a movie about it. This is the ideal B2B environment. Find People. MORE >>

One is Element14 , a social community for engineers sponsored by an electronics distributor of the same name. wrote in B-to-B magazine early this year about a Make magazine-like video series they started last fall that appeals to engineers’ passion for tinkering as well as for fun. Other new stuff that they’re doing (and this comes directly from the press release): The industry’s first online design hub – the element14 knode – designed to help engineers accelerate design and development and bring products to market faster than ever before. MORE >>

Marketers often ask how they can train engineers and technical people to blog, podcast and otherwise engage in deep online conversations with customers. imagine that in a highly technical field, like bio-engineering, the rate is even higher. My advice: don’t bother. You’re better off investing in professional communicators and teaching them what they need to know about your business. The ability to communicate well in any media demands a certain amount of innate ability and it’s a difficult skill to teach. What’s that going to cost you? Like most things in life, it depends. MORE >>

Crowdsourced product development is far cheaper than hiring legions of engineers. I’ve been looking forward to reading The Hyper-Social Organization since I first heard François Gossieaux and Ed Moran discuss the findings of their “Tribalization of Business&# research at a conference two years ago. wasn’t disappointed. In this groundbreaking book, the authors expand upon ideas laid down in their early research that are both simple to grasp and momentous in their implications. In a business context, however, tribes have barely been a factor. Rules Have Changed. MORE >>

CIThread has spent the last 15 months building an inference engine that uses artificial intelligence principles to give curators a kind of intelligent assistant. The curator starts by presenting the engine with a basic set of keywords. CIThread scours the Web for relevant content, much like a search engine does. As those decisions are made, the engine analyzes the content to identify patterns. CIThread can also tie in to Web analytics engines to fold audience behavior into its decision-making. world. This task has never been easy to automate. Shhhhh! MORE >>