double POSITIVE Marketing Group, Inc.

Here at DoublePositive, we’re big fans of LinkedIn. Every person in our organization, no matter what their function, has a LinkedIn profile. We use it to generate sales leads, network with partner companies, to rectuit potential employees, to interact with a larger community — we even use it to promote the blog you are reading right now.

While we are all very active users, we try not to be LinkedIn “whores.” In other words, just because I’ve met someone once, swapped business cards at a trade show, or know someone through some random connection — that doesn’t mean I will accept your LinkedIn invitation to connect. I’ve got a good network, and I don’t want to dilute it.

We’ve also noticed how targeted the advertising on LinkedIn is, and why shouldn’t it be? LinkedIn knows everything important about me — my age, my sex, where I live, my job, my address, where I went to college.  Combine all of that information I’ve provided with some behavioral targeting, and LinkedIn knows me better than I know myself. I would say that I click on more ads on LinkedIn than any other website I’ve ever visited.

So LinkedIn is HOT, helped in large part to the $15 billion valuation Facebook recently received. So I wasn’t surprised to read that News Corp. is considering acquiring LinkedIn, perhaps for $1 billion. Is LinkedIn worth $1 billion? Who knows — after all, they are doing no more than $100 million in annual revenue. But, what I do know is that this guy is a freaking idiot:

“It’s all bulls*%t,” says Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry. “The market has to come to some realization that LinkedIn just has a bunch of email addresses. I don’t think News Corp. is a sophisticated buyer. The company should be worth 1.5 times revenue and that’s it.”

Wow… Here is a guy who just doesn’t get it. LinkedIn “just has a bunch of email addresses.” And Google is just a bunch of links. And YouTube is just a bunch of videos. And Ebay a bunch of junk.

While newspaper publishers continue to see shrinking revenue from classified advertising, News Corp. sees LinkedIn as a critical component of its recent acquisition of the WSJ and other publications around the world.

Question the valuation, but don’t make yourself look like a fool by suggesting that LinkedIn is nothing more than an email list.