Earlier this year, LinkedIn started offering a news sharing feature. Now any user that clicks through an article shared on a LinkedIn group will be able to share and comment directly from the news article.

“We’ve received a ton of great feedback on the feature, with some of our users mentioning how inconvenient it was to participate in a group conversation given the additional step of returning to the news discussion page to leave a comment,” says Jen Granito on the LinkedIn blog. “We’re now incorporating some of these suggestions we gathered, starting with the ActionBar.”

Users can now also discover related news content through the same toolbar, without having to switch back and forth between the news discussion page on LinkedIn and the actual news article.

“LinkedIn’s ActionBar will allow group members to find and add value to the news that is most important to their respective groups,” says Granito. “And, our goal with this iteration is to make it even simpler for users to participate in these conversations.”

The action bar is similar to other toolbars from social networks like Facebook and Digg. Today’s announcement simply makes the ActionBar more usable with the popular business professional network.

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Even when consumers aren’t showering them with cash, retailers need to stay in touch, according to a new report.  And Rockbridge Associates and the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business recommend that they do so by maintaining presences on social networking sites.

In a paper titled "Changing Consumer Priorities in Tough Times," these two organizations argued, "Continuing the relationship with customers is a key strategy for service providers as they provide opportunities for the businesses to recoup revenues through up-selling at a later point in time."

 

Social networks seem to provide the ideal way of maintaining contact, too, as the paper also stated, "Compared to a year ago, more [U.S. adults] are interacting with friends and family online through social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn.  Specifically, 33 percent are doing this more, 14 percent are doing this less, and 53 percent are doing this the same; the only activity that is increasing at a faster pace is television watching."

So companies that don’t feel like spending lots of money on TV commercials should consider that it’s possible to reach similar audiences online for free.

Then, when people are ready to start spending again (99 percent of the study’s participants agreed that the economy’s in either a recession or a depression at the moment), these savvy companies will already be a part of their daily lives.

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