Saasu is connecting to Professional and Social Networks (PSN) including; LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook, Bebo and Orkut. The beauty of SaaS is it enables these types of advantages.

In the contact screen you will see new icons you can click to check out your contact in various social networks covering over 200 million people already.

I’ll concentrate on LinkedIn today since it is the most professional centric network. Professional and Social Networking really is a far too simplistic simplistic way of describing LinkedIn.

Here are some observations we’ve made in recent times. We would love comment on these points as we believe this has ramifications for product development in Saasu applications. A lot of them relate to the fact your research can be anonymous but connections are permissioned.

If you need to know more about permission, start with Seth Godin because he wrote about it early and well. Permission marketing is changing the world.

Keep track of people you know and like

The simple and best reason to use LinkedIn. You know where people are as they move from one job or city to another. It can be everything from an online business intelligence assistant to an international (or local) research tool to an online CV/resume or yet another contact database. Best of all is it doesn’t stop there, you see who knows who.

Research accelerates the ‘getting to know you’ process for new contacts

LinkedIn closes the knowledge gap you have about candidates, employees, prospects, partners, suppliers and customers. This enhances the legitimacy of the contact. It accelerates you along the getting to know you curve. It can help move you a bit further ahead at your first face to face meeting because you already know more things you have in common, locations, employers, clubs, education, sport and more.

Get personal by de-institutionalising contacts

For a long time companies have not wanted to share ownership of customer and prospect relationships with their employees. These relationships have been owned by the company. LinkedIn allows employees (especially professionals with an eye to having their own business eventually) to de-institutionalise their contacts, taking back some of the dollar value from their employees balance sheet back to their own. A two edged sword of course. Transparency is the biggest winner.

Stay fresh reduce your contact half life

Keeping loose contact fresh is quite difficult. When systematised in a social network the expectation of freshness of permission is enhanced. When you hear from someone through LinkedIn your little shoulder devil says “this person is ok, because you permissioned them”. That same communication via phone would sometimes have the shoulder devil saying “Who is this person? How did they get my number?”. Permissioning extends credibility of contact.

Degree’s of separation permissioning

Linked in creates a new type of commercial relationship legitimacy. Invited recipients will tend to accept being network beneficiaries themselves. The established connection has value, an unrealised dollar value. It costs us anywhere from $0.10 to $100 to get a permissioned contact in most businesses so connections in social tools are real permissioned assets. Let’s be honest about this, it’s just good business. Participants in the LinkedIn community can monetise their connections via sales and marketing activities. This is the conversion of unrealised value into realised value because a certain percentage of those interactions result in sale and thus revenue. You are converting your virtual inventory of permissioned contacts into your revenue line. The beauty being that virtual inventory can be resold to, it doesn’t require a cost of goods sold entry to re-aquire another permissioned contact. Don’t think of it just as product sales. It could be a better career, some venture capital, a new partner, and of course selling your product.

Channel Degradation - BACN

If you plan to use LinkedIn for sales bear in mind that there is a direct relationship between frequency and value of the permissioned contact set you have. Your behaviour could become known as a commercial version of spam called BACN. Equally, as more participants use the medium for sales and marketing activities the value of the connections will diminish. You only have to look at the C2C social networks to see how this can happen. Permissioned spammers (BACN) looking for love from your wallet wears thin real quick.

New ways of looking at non-so-new information

Check out the company profile pages on any major company on LinkedIn. You can see who is who and any changes. Recently LinkedIn moved to formalise companies and organisations in their network for the benefit of data rigour, their members and themselves. It was a good move, it cleans up the problem where many users add they workplace to their profile resulting in 100’s of version of that work place where picking it from a list would be better. In short companies and organisations are now centrally managed. A great benefit of this is that the tracking of organisations over their lifecycle will be very accurate versus some of the rubbish you get from old style directory providers Yellowpages and Whitepages.