Atomic client LinkedIn featured on cover of PR Week, Feb 4th
Joins Atomic clients Echelon and BitTorrent, also covered in PR Week feature stories in past 90 days
LinkedIn was featured on the cover of PR Week on February 4th, following other Atomic clients Echelon (NASDAQ: ELON) who got the cover November 4, 2007 and BitTorrent, who was featured in a major case study article in early December.
Atomic was named PR agency of record in October, 2006 by an agency review committee headed by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, plus Keith Rabois (now Vice President of Strategy & Business Development at Slide) and Konstantin Guericke (now CEO at Jaxtr) after a thorough review of top agencies, and numerous discussions between LinkedIn and Atomic team members.
The original assignment was to help increase member usage of a number of new LinkedIn features. After conducting an initial battery of ComContext research, the Atomic team suggested that the assignment be redefined and expanded to include...
a. separating LinkedIn from size comparisons to MySpace and Facebook, and cementing LinkedIn's positioning as the largest and highest quality online platform for professionals,
b. expanding LinkedIn's brand associations from Silicon Valley to users in the broader U.S. business mainstream, and
c. expanding awareness of LinkedIn's utility from recruiting and job seeking, to managing professional image and opportunity in a broader sense.
To achieve the original objective of driving greater usage of new features, Atomic recommended an approach combining blogger relations and deskside demonstrations of LinkedIn to journalists, showing them how LinkedIn features could help them do their own jobs. Working with LinkedIn's then newly hired director of communications Kay Luo, the first blogger to talk about new ways to use LinkedIn was Guy Kawasaki, in this seminal post and many continue to follow.
In Phase 2 of the program, collaborating closely with new LinkedIn VP Patrick Crane and Kay, Atomic has been instrumental in formulating strategy and executing LinkedIn initiatives including the company's participation in Google's Open Social announcement - helping conceive, name and execute LinkedIn's Beyond the Connection initiative in print, broadcast and online media - and assisting in the packaging, naming and execution of LinkedIn's Open API program, InApps, with BusinessWeek as one of the top partners in the initiative.
