Yesterday, several of us were fortunate enough to attend the BMA Chicago MarketingMasters luncheon with Patrick Crane and Steve Patrizi of LinkedIn. I wasn’t able to attend the one-on-one coaching sessions, but the folks I talked to said it was a lot of help.

Patrick Crane kicked off the luncheon with the history of LinkedIn, a milestone-based review of the growth they’ve enjoyed and an overview of the many ways to use LinkedIn. We touched on the just-launched LinkedIn Applications in an earlier blog post, but Patrick also covered LinkedIn Events and yet other ways to use your profile as both a marketing vehicle for yourself and your company.

Steve Patrizi held a breakout session immediately aftwards entitled “How B2B Marketers Can Put LinkedIn to Work.” The part of this session that resonated most with me was his review of five ways b-to-b marketers can use LinkedIn. Here they are:

Leverage your own best assets—your people. Steve mentioned that many companies are encouraging their employees to get involved with social-media communities both as a way to understand these communities as well as to market the company. Some, such as IBM, are going so far as to establish social-media policies so employees know how to interact and represent their company when engaging in these communities. He recommends that nothing heavy handed occur, like forcing employees to engage or participate, but rather that companies provide suggested methods for interaction and suggested ways to reference a company or brand.

Listen to and learn from your customers. Social media represent a great opportunity for companies to listen to their customers and get feedback and insights without directly asking for it, which can often cause feedback to be filtered. By paying attention to communities where your customers frequent, you can both elicit feedback as well as eventually influence the community, depending on your motivations.

Target and engage your customers Piggybacking on the above point, LinkedIn provides targeting for advertising based on geography, ethnicity, industry, profession, and company size. LinkedIn also offers the ability to create and run direct or person-to-person ads, which can be purchased on an as-needed basis.

Join the conversation and add value. LinkedIn provides a number of sponsorship and value added marketing opportunities. These include pulling in unique, contextual content from external platforms, asking insightful industry questions and running specifically targeted polls.

Experiment. Steve joked that to some this may seem like “I had to come up with five things and I couldn’t think of anything else,” but he emphasized that no one really has this space figured out and the only way to truly figure out what platforms or social-media communities have value is to test them out. He also emphasized that now is the time because many of these communities are not oversaturated with marketers and by participating, even if it’s only at a small level, you can be one of just a few voices in each community.

Overall, it seemed that many of the people who I spoke with afterwards thought it was very informative session, especially in terms of the new LinkedIn Applications and Events offerings.