Liz Gannes over on Gigaom has a little interview today with Ried Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn.

Liz threw Reid some softballs.   I’d like to throw him a straight down the middle fast-ball.   The kind that, if you know it’s coming, is dead easy to hit out of the park.

So, here it is: Reid, when are you going to make an Enterprise Gateway for LinkedIn?

Companies just want to authenticate their people.   This is easy.   And it doesn’t break anything on LinkedIn now.   Just add a simple feature that lets user’s get an “Verified” logo on their profile.  

The end user would get an internal email from their company saying:

• Get on LinkedIn because it will help us network
• Then click here, and verify your id with us

Companies will pay for this gateway for two reasons:

• It helps them to tell the world who works for them and who doesn’t.   If you get canned, you don’t have to update your LinkedIn profile, but you do loose the little “Verified” sticker.
• It creates enough structure to help facilitate internal networking

That second point might sound a little weird at first, but it is important.   If you work for a company of more than 500 people, you don’t know everyone.   If you work for a company with thousands of employees, it is hard to know who to talk to about anything new and innovative.

The LinkedIn Enterprise Gateway server is just the current LinkedIn Groups feature with a couple of additional bells and whistles to help companies integrate information from their directory servers.

Once the LinkedIn Enterprise Gateway server is in place, all sorts of new opportunities arise.   Direct integration into Enterprise HR might be one.   Direct feeds into address books might be another.

So, Reid, what’s it going to be?

Are you going to talk with the Enterprise, or are you going to force companies to take their business over to some place like OpenBC?

Update:

Yup, you guessed it. I haven’t heard back from anyone at LinkedIn. I remember when Microsoft got back to me within 45 minutes. Sure, it would be a lot to expect to hear from Reid himself, but Yo! LinkedIn!… this is the blogosphere…. Helloooo!!!! Are you guys interested in the conversation? This was a real question.

Upadte2: Select Minds

However, I did hear from was Joseph O’Connell, who works for SelectMinds. SelectMinds is private labelled Facebook for business with a big consulting / support operation. This is SaaS on steroids, and is one of my favorite business models. Another great example is GlobeOp, which is SaaS for trading back office + the team to run the back office.

I could see plenty of instances where a company might be better served by SelectMinds, rather than fighting to try and get the attention of the people at LinkedIn.