LinkedIn Events Hubs Goes Physical

Global Launch rolls out starting October, 17th, 2019.

With WeWork in shambles in a failed IPO, LinkedIn has chosen the perfect time to debut its new concept of helping companies and users to launch physical networking events.

It's something we've all been hoping LinkedIn would do for years.

Are you planning a professional networking gathering and want a convenient solution? LinkedIn as a global networking platform is getting into the space, literally.

LinkedIn needs to improve its product in its O2O offering, which is online to offline services. Events Hubs in this sense has a lot of potential.

Microsoft as a company understands the importance of evolving its impact on customers as people and face to face interactions can kickstart how we do networking in a world saturated with online interactions, notifications, and social media overload.

Whether at a local networking meet-up, a workshop or an alumni gathering, in-person interactions can help you create and foster deeper professional relationships. - LinkedIn Blog

Especially with WeWork in disarray, Events Hub could steal some of its thunder. Sadly in November 2017, WeWork bought Meetup for $200 million and the product has gone downhill since then. This includes even charging members additional dollars. Obviously that's not the spirit that made Meetup popular.

That being said Microsoft owned LinkedIn must finally see an opportunity here. LinkedIn is launching a new feature called Events, a (currently free) tool for people to plan, announce and invite people to meetups and other get-togethers, in the physical world, said TechCrunch.

The LinkedIn Events feature provides members with an easy way to create and join professional events that interest them. This feature helps grow active, professional communities by building authentic, face-to-face relationships. LinkedIn members can use the feature to connect online with other members so they can meet them offline in a professional capacity.

LinkedIn is pretty good at adding features that could interest its user base.

So what will you be able to do with it?

With LinkedIn Events, you’ll be able to:

• Seamlessly create and join professional events
• Invite your connections, manage your event
• Have conversations with other attendees, and stay in touch online after the event ends.

At this time, the ability to create and organize an event is being gradually rolled out to all our LinkedIn members. Think about it though, the power of connecting in person is unmistakable. According to LinkedIn help on the mater:

• A happy hour to connect with your college alumni
• A meetup to mingle with fellow entrepreneurs
• An event to discuss best practices for design
• A workshop or a training
• A product demo or launch

 It's rolling out first in English-speaking countries starting October 17 (for me that is tomorrow!). It will be available and enable new kinds of real-life activities to occur and have a menu in the mobile app as well.

LinkedIn boasts 645 million global members. That's not nothing, so enabling these users to interact to create professional opportunities and offline activities that can create value, is just huge!

While LinkedIn has struggled to compete in China, it's doing great in India.

Can you see yourself using this feature? Let me know in a comment below.

Can LinkedIn Upgrade Its Community in the Physical World?

Starting tomorrow, you can begin by visiting the ‘Community’ panel located on the left side of the newsfeed and click +Create. Next, you would need to provide a description, a date and time, a venue, and then invite your connections using filters such as location, company, industry, and school.

This feature has been in the works for years, and might do exceedingly well in India where LinkedIn's user base is younger than in the West. From earlier pilots this is basically how it looks:

Kind of neat.

According to LinkedIn's blog:

• From your event page, you can easily track attendees and invitees, post updates and interact with other attendees.
• LinkedIn’s algorithm automatically provides timely and relevant notifications to attendees to make sure they don’t miss any important updates about your event.
• Members who have joined the event can also invite people from their own networks to attend.

So it sounds like this could be an efficient way to organize, mobilize and bring industry people together in your local area. LinkedIn Meetups, if you will. This could be hugely interesting to industries where conferences and meetups have a big role, such as with blockchain startups and their respective communities.

Of course knowing LinkedIn, eventually, this will be a significant paid product. LinkedIn knows how to be profitable. However, for now, we should expect Events to be free to use and with a fairly limited in its first iteration.

LinkedIn's app is slowly approaching "super app" status with a ton of features to keep users engaged. Whatever you use LinkedIn for, having in-person Events tethered to the app makes sense to bring these 600+ million users together in better ways.