According to Bianca Male with the Business Insider, LinkedIn just announced the release of an application that will incorporate your professional network into your Microsoft Outlook account.

According to the LinkedIn blog, "As soon as LinkedIn and Outlook are connected, Outlook will start bringing in information about your LinkedIn network. You should then start seeing profile photos and LinkedIn activity for any connection that e-mails you."

The greatest benefit of the application seems to be that it automatically adds contact updates to a special "LinkedIn Contacts" folder, making it easy to stay on top of your connections' information.

You can read more about the release on the LinkedIn blog.

Or check out their video on how to connect your LinkedIn and Outlook accounts:

According to Aaron Bronzan on the official LinkedIn blog:
"Starting today, we bring you the ability to reorder the sections on your LinkedIn profile via drag-and-drop. This enhancement, one of the more highly-requested features from our users, gives you the ability to highlight the skills, expertise, and/or experiences that make you stand out.

Your profile is an important part of your online professional identity. At LinkedIn we’d like to provide you with all the tools you need to build and maintain a profile that can showcase your unique professional value. Now you’re in complete control over your professional brand."

Here is a quick demo of how it works:

"The ability to reorder the sections on your profile is just the first of a huge number of enhancements that are coming to your LinkedIn profile in the upcoming months. And, as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions about how LinkedIn can help you to represent, manage, and share your professional identity."

Thanks to my friend, Jennifer McClure, for breaking this news via Twitter.

This is a guest post by Bill Seaver of MicroExplosion Media. While attending BarCamp Nashville, I saw Bill give an outstanding presentation. I enjoyed meeting Bill and other talented members of the Nashville technology and media community. Bill and I had a great conversation about LinkedIn and other social media tools. Thank you to Bill for compiling this blog post and producing the accompanying video:

That title pretty much describes my feeling about this conversation with Jenny DeVaughn of Social Precision in Atlanta. I met Jenny at Barcamp Nashville last month and realized she has expertise in LinkedIn…something I have been less than enthusiastic about in the past.

In this video, Jenny provides excellent insight into how to think about LinkedIn.

The biggest takeaway for me is that LinkedIn is NOT a communication tool like Facebook or Twitter. It’s a research tool. If you make that distinction, it changes everything. Jenny shares some of the ways (some of which are almost scary) you can tap into LinkedIn for business research, business development, networking, and competitive intelligence.

If you’re trying to figure out where (or if) LinkedIn fits into your social media strategy, I think the 12 minutes in this video will be helpful. I know it’s got me rethinking LinkedIn.

What You May Have Missed In LinkedIn from Bill Seaver on Vimeo.

If you have already connected your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, your Twitter name will now show up in your profile with a link to your Twitter page. This is a great enhancement for those of us that use LinkedIn as a research and business development tool.

Still need to join your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts? Click here!

To add your Twitter account, visit “Edit My Profile” and click “Add Twitter account” next to the Twitter field. Twitter will ask you to verify your account name and password. Once the account is verified, you’ll be asked how you’d like to share your tweets on LinkedIn (see below). Note that once your accounts are joined, you can change this setting at any time by clicking “Edit” next to your Twitter account name.

Note that in order to send tweets from Twitter to LinkedIn, your Twitter account must be set as public. Make sure the “Protect my tweets” box is not checked in your Twitter Settings.

Click here to add your Twitter account to LinkedIn.

You can choose which LinkedIn status updates you share with Twitter, as well as which tweets are displayed as your LinkedIn status. This gives you complete control over which networks see your updates and what they see, automatically or manually.

To share updates from Twitter to LinkedIn, visit the settings page. Here you have the option to share all tweets, to share only tweets that contain #in or #li, or not to share tweets at all. You can change these settings at any time be clicking “Edit” next to your Twitter account name.

To share updates from LinkedIn to Twitter, check the box next to the Twitter icon on the LinkedIn home page. The first time you do this, Twitter will verify your account name and password. Whenever the Twitter box is checked, that update will publish to your Twitter feed. Click here to edit your Twitter settings on LinkedIn.

Hashtags (#) are a way to provide additional context for your tweets. Use #in or #li to publish your Twitter updates to your LinkedIn status. Just make “#in” part of your tweet (for example, “Working on a new blog post about design optimization. #in”), and it will be displayed as your LinkedIn status. These can be added to your tweets at any time and will override your sharing settings. If your tweet is personal and you don’t wish to share it with your professional crowd, just exclude #in or #li.

Excerpt from: http://learn.linkedin.com/twitter/

LinkedIn steps up its client management capabilities by launching Profile Organizer.
Check out the 60 second video demo:

Profile Organizer costs $24.95 - 499.95 per month depending upon the number of messages, profiles and folders you may use.

Since I have over 17,000 first level connections on LinkedIn, I wonder if this is the best way to organize my contacts from LinkedIn. Would you prefer to keep this information organized in LinkedIn or export the data to another resource?

Do you feel like all of the social media networks are taking over your life? It can feel overwhelming. At the end of the day, do feel like you just spent a lot of time online and didn't accomplish anything?

The social media tools that I use save me time, instead of wasting it. You can create a work/life balance using social media.

Here are some basic time management tips for the major social media sites:

Twitter - Let's face it. The public Twitter stream is full of noise. Use TweetDeck to set up filters, groups and searches. Focus on the industry leaders and potential clients that can advance your professional growth. Plan time to tweet and stick to it.

Facebook - Check Facebook after normal business hours. I use Facebook mainly for personal use. It can be a distraction from my professional goals. It is easy to start a click fest and forget what your purpose was by checking Facebook in the first place. Become a fan of any important company or group pages, so you will be notified of updates or upcoming events.

LinkedIn - I have always had a free account and have over 17,000 first level connections. Many people wonder how I was able to do this. It's simple. I set specific goals to grow my network. Every day I would send out a specific amount of invites and spend 30 minutes on revenue producing activities in LinkedIn.

Be sure that when you are working online that you are not randomly checking for updates to your social media networks. When using any social media tool, you must focus on your reason for being there and determine your action plan to reach your goals.