Back in March, LinkedIn announced the launch of company profiles.  The problem was, users couldn't create the profiles themselves, and Mario Sundar, LinkedIn's community evangelist who volunteered to help, was soon overwhelmed with requests.  So now we have the solution: a DIY company profile creation process.

The procedure is rather simple.  Step one, as a post on the LinkedIn Blog explains, is to "[e]nter your company name and your email address.  This ensures that you are a current employee of this company and that your company doesn't already have a profile."

 Company Profile Mockup

Next, you provide some basic facts.  Think website address, number of employees, a short description, and the company's type and industry.  Toss in the headquarters location, and you're about set to move on.

The final step is just a matter of fleshing things out.  The LinkedIn Blog post suggests naming related companies or adding a logo, and then notes, "[Y]our colleagues from the company can also edit the information once they're identified as belonging to a specific company group."

Creating company profiles on LinkedIn may help businesses attract new employees, which has the potential to be useful.  Also interesting is the way in which company profiles have become public, meaning they can show up in search results and give businesses an extra edge with Google.

You can take the pages owned by Amazon and Intel as examples.  LinkedIn's Joe Betz goes on to note, "We've got over 160,000 company profiles, which anyone can now link to, . . . run through a translator (Yahoo! in German), etc..  These company public profiles are densely linked both with each other and with our member public profiles, making for a pretty substantial web of publicly available data."