LinkedIn is taking big leaps in the battle for social network relevance. After launching integration with Twitter, enabling tweets to be sent from within LinkedIn, the professional social networking site has announced a new partnership with Microsoft. LinkedIn will now  integrate with Microsoft Office 2010 as an add-on, going a long way in reaching the business users they’re targeting in their most-used medium – email. If you’re all about cross-synchronizing your contact information between your business software and social media networks, here you go!

According to Microsoft, the add-on provides a social media context to your emails – when you receive a message from a LinkedIn member, Outlook displays a collapsible window with the contact’s latest LinkedIn activities. This includes pictures of your contacts (pulled from their Linkedin profiles), who they’ve recently connected to on the network, and any status updates they’ve posted on the site. Even if you aren’t connected with a contact on LinkedIn, you can invite him or her to connect within Outlook (although no invite acceptance yet).

A real bonus for those of us who find keeping contact info up to date will be the ability to see the most recent professional information about a contact, including their most recent job and location – and, if a contact changes their contact information in LinkedIn, Outlook automatically updates as well.

Of course, all this sounds super nifty in an announcement, but we’ll have to wait and see how well this works in the real world. Personally, I have yet to find a compelling reason for adding LinkedIn time to my already crammed social media focus, doing little more in the platform than create a profile, and I’m not convinced too many others are doing much better. I’m interested to see what this means for LinkedIn in the future.

The add-on will ship with Microsoft 2010, but can be downloaded to work with Outlook 2003 and 2007.

(Source: TechCrunch)

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