• by Karl Greenberg , November 2, 2010

Until now, LinkedIn was the only one of the top four social media sites that didn't have a platform for companies and brands to create their own pages. No longer. The Mountain View, Calif. company was in New York on Tuesday to unveil a new Company Pages program intended to give brands a channel for generating recommendations -- versus "friends" as on Facebook -- from professionals. 

Steve Patrizi, VP of LinkedIn's marketing solutions, said 30 million people joined the social medium just last year, and 3 million are joining every month. The site gets 24 million uniques per month as well. Company Pages follows last year's Custom Groups, where members could create a joint page based on a shared interest.

"It's not about the brand or marketer, but that community of professionals," he said. For example, Qwest launched something called SMB IT Connection, and Marriott bowed "Driven Professionals." Rather than overt branding, the sites are intended purely as forums.

The presentation included a panel discussion with Marty St. George, the CMO of JetBlue, and Kari Homan, HP's worldwide digital strategy manager. Commenting on the virtues of the four big social sites -- YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn -- both said recommendations are the top goal for ROI, but that being friended and tweeted have their roles.

"I think 'recommendation' is a higher bar, but all four are important to us," said Homan. "We did a prioritization exercise to see what each [social media site] brings: Facebook brings broad engagement; it has lots of options. With Twitter, it's an opportunity for frequency and velocity of message, whether pre-event or post-, at the PR level or as a platform for influencers; YouTube is important for a very specific type of content; and LinkedIn -- we thought of it as a business meeting, but now we think of it as a business marketplace."

Both HP and JetBlue say that despite the importance of social media channels, they have not moved away from making their Web sites core to online strategy. "Over the past year and a half, we are focusing on the digital ecosystem," said Homan, "but our corporate site, HP.com, serves a wide range from corporate to consumer to enterprise and life cycle. We complement with internal communities as well as mobile and external presences like social media, and use those as complementary elements. So we have an ecosystem in which HP.com is still really key."

Said St. George: "Our Web site is fundamentally our cash register." In coming months, however, the company will be doing more in social media, he said, because other networks let the carrier create brand-engagement content "without jeopardizing our conversion rate. So we see our Web site as paramount, but would love opportunities to have a lot of engagement in key communities."

He said that one problem JetBlue faces is that tracking tools aren't up to speed on community sites. "We need to track because we take every dollar we spend online and turn it into cost of booking." As long as that can be tracked and proven to increase booking, he said, the company will pump money into social.

St. George said that sites like LinkedIn are a good bet for JetBlue because the airline doesn't have the budget of the larger carriers, and has a major challenge getting to the end user for business travel.

"As we build our efforts in terms of business orientation, the ability to get to our audience is critical," he said, adding that for many companies, traditional routes to marketing are hard because travel managers do the booking. So sites like LinkedIn offer another route -- one that St. George thinks will work because of the airline's satisfaction scores. "It's a giant-killer app for us, because of passionate customers talking to friends."