As the Internet users have seen the exponential growth of the content on the social Web continue for a long period, in order to prevent the uneccessary data overloads, it has become increasingly important to take in place smart tools that help users to filter the things that are most relevant and useful to them. In that spirit, the white-collar social-networking LinkedIn, which has 75 million members and seven-year history, has recently announced its acquisition with mSpoke, a small SAAS (software-as-a-service) start-up that offers recommendation technology.
Who is mSpoke?
If you have no idea about the acquired company, here is a brief introduction. MSpoke is a small online recommendation software start-up, which maintains a cloud-based recommendation engine to make content more relevant through recommendation technology. MSpoke’s machine learning technology is designed to make recommendations based on consumer’s implicit and explicit feedback. From that it builds a so-called adaptive personalization engine with three core products:
- mPower creates widgets and personalised e-mails to let web publishers filter content according to the preferences of users, which is great for direct e-mail marketing.
- mTrend API allows companies to monitor competitors and emerging trends.
- mSense tool analyses content and creates and annotates metadata within systems.
What does LinkedIn get from the acquisition?
LinkedIn will take advantage of mSpoke's recommendation technology to integrate and add functions to its rapidly expanding network. The company expects the recommendation technology will deliver relevant content, advertising and products to its social network users to keep its users more engaged on the site, and to increase its presence on mobile devices. Then it also offer opportunities for online advertisers to target the right audience and create relevant copywriting.
The generated data from mSense, the most valuable component for LinkedIn, could be exploited to provide users recommendations about other relevant people in the LinkedIn networks based upon trends, usage or networking patterns.
The combination of recent added social features and recomendation technology will provide professionals on LinkedIn personalized news, highlighted updates, and what executives in similar careers are reading and doing on the network. For your information, LinkedIn has recently become more social by adding social features, for instance, revamping its “Groups” feature with “Likes,” Follows and Discussions options. LinkedIn has also been building more Facebook- and Twitter-like features on the homepage and link sharing options to generate more traffic and data to the site. All of these developments will generate a lot of valuable data. When they are combined with mSense, all will make LinkedIn a more useful and interactive site to users.
From all the observations, in a sense, it is seen that the world is moving very fast, social businesses are even moving faster, and every player aims to be the fastest forward-mover in order to maintain its reputation and engage more audience.
