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How to be a LinkedIn superstar February 9, 2009

LinkedIn Launches Powerful Events Feature – ReadWriteWeb November 7, 2008

What hot events should I attend in my industry? That’s a frequently asked question in many professional conversations. LinkedIn today offers a great way to answer that question with the launch of its new Events feature.

LinkedIn Events offers not just event search, but recommendations based on the contents of your profile, sophisticated information about attendees and updates about the events in your LinkedIn update feed. Eight thousand events are already listed and event organizers can ad more.

Read The Rest—>LinkedIn Launches Powerful Events feature – ReadWriteWeb

Why I’m Loving the new LinkedIn Applications Hard Knox Life: A Brand Manager Blog by Dave Knox November 5, 2008

I have been a big fan of LinkedIn for a long time. But its never been one of those social networking sites that I visit every day or spend much time on. Instead, I would bounce onto the site when I needed to add a new business connection or update my profile.

But that might just change thanks to the new LinkedIn Applications that were launched last week. While they only have a handful of applications right now, I am already finding them tremendously useful for tapping into information about my business network. While they have similarities to what you might find on Facebook, the real difference is the type of network you are tapping into. Each and every application on LinkedIn is extremely relevent to my business network. Take for instance the following:

Read The Rest—>Why I’m Loving the new LinkedIn Applications Hard Knox Life: A Brand Manager Blog by Dave Knox

Why you'll finally use LinkedIn December 14, 2007

The buttoned-down social network has a new CEO, a growing membership, and an increasingly-useful set of features.

NEW YORK (Fortune) — For years, I’ve been befuddled by LinkedIn. I knew it was supposed to be the social network for work, but to me it was like war. “What is it good for?” I asked myself repeatedly, even as I occasionally poked around and accepted requests to link with people. I belonged to it, but I really didn’t know why.

The other day I had a chance to sit down with LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye, who’s been on the job since February. He told me about a few changes that Linkedin subsequently announced (VentureBeat has a good description of them.). And his PR person upgraded me to what would otherwise be a paid account. (It can be $20 to $200 per month.)

I have had a revelation. Linkedin isn’t bad. For all my well-known (and even ridiculed) enthusiasm for Facebook, Linkedin shows there will be plenty of room for other ways to connect with people on the Web.

Linkedin aims for a much more functional role in your life. While Facebook remains better designed and conceived, in my opinion, it is not likely any time soon to help you find a job, hire a contractor or consultant, or figure out who you should hire for a position.

That’s because of two things. First, despite all the criticism of its privacy policies, Facebook is fundamentally based on the notion of privacy. You cannot find out much about someone unless they have willingly elected to be your “friend,” or if they are in a partially-open network you also belong to – for your town or workplace or school. The other reason is that Facebook is intended to be a communications medium. Think of it as, in part, a way to broadcast information about yourself.

Linkedin, by contrast, is a sort of high-end consensual database of colleagues. In some ways it aims to turn the entire planet’s workforce into one big set of colleagues, who only come to know one another when one can solve a problem for the other. You can look for that job or find that consultant or employee, because Linkedin’s member data is essentially open for all to see, and because the site offers search tools to help you slice and dice it. (They are much more sophisticated and useful if you’re a paying member.)

In recent months Linkedin has reached a new critical mass. I know this in part because Nye told me the service now has 17 million members, up from only 8 million when he arrived. But I also know it personally because, for example, until very recently it contained hardly any of my classmates from college. While my class only included about 300, now about 40 of them are on Linkedin. (You generally tell the system what class you were in when you join.) And colleagues at Fortune and friends outside the tech industry (Linkedin’s initial user base) are joining quickly.

“We are focused on Linkedin as a productivity tool,” says Nye. “We don’t want to be compared to other sites that are just about pageviews and frequency of use. We want to give you the information you need to do your job better.” As for Facebook, he says “It makes sense to keep your personal and your professional lives separate.”

That last one I frankly doubt, in an era when the line between the two is so gray. Facebook will become more functional as it adds features that enable us to slice and dice our relationships to more accurately reflect the fact that one “friend” is a PR person who calls to pitch me a lot and the other is my brother. But Linkedin will remain useful, albeit not so often nor so enjoyably.

Nye said that if you were seeking a “product manager with an MBA trained in Six Sigma who lives in Cincinnati” you’d probably find six. I did that exact search, and actually found one.

Nye himself wanted to hire a former Procter & Gamble marketer who had been in Silicon Valley for a while. Using Linkedin, he claims he found eight names immediately and within half an hour was on the phone with one he had quickly vetted by e-mailing mutual friends (LinkedIn tracks those very well).

LinkedIn also enables you to ask questions either of specific members or the whole hoi polloi. You could, for example, ask an HR manager at a company similar to yours if your salary is fair.

A new interface design, still in beta, is an overdue and attractive visual upgrade. With the latest features, Linkedin aims to become more of a portal drawing users back daily. One, launched in partnership with Business Week, allows you to read a news item and examine names and companies mentioned through the lens of your own connectedness. (Nye recited the depressing figure that only 30 percent of LinkedIn’s members have read any business magazine in the last 30 days.)

Maybe that’s why people recently found credible a rumor that News Corp. was angling to buy the service, which Nye has said would not sell for less than $1 billion. But a very senior News Corp. executive I spoke with says there is “no way” the company would ever be interested in paying nearly that much.

But LinkedIn has established a key position in the business ecosystem. If it keeps developing its functionality, and especially if it reduces its fees, which are ridiculously high for anyone who is not either hiring or looking for work, I see a bright future. It will further speed the pace of commerce by helping us all better find the people we need to get work done.

Facebook has started banning people for using pseudonyms November 2, 2007

By Mark Blei

Facebook banned political satirist Jon Swift for doing what writers have been doing for centuries- using a pen name .

Given the rash of people who have been fired for having had their employers see pictures,opinions or content of them that are less then flattering, Facebook had better look at giving people more privacy options as opposed to less. People with a well-known industry specific name find that it is important to have a Facebook presence for social networking reasons, and also possibly another one for business.

More and more people are drifting away from the more standardized business networking platforms in search of warmer platforms with decent API applications , something Facebook has been innovating. Users should either be allowed to set up accounts in ways that allow them to show specific content to specific groups. I think that you will find that even now , you’re going to have a large percentage of people who have a both public and personal Facebook presence.

Facebook is in the unique position of having an opportunity to not only be a social network but a business network, displacing such mainstays as LinkedIn . Facebook needs to see the possibilities of such a movement and provide appropriate tools for both groups to use the interface.

This posting is a personal opinion article by Mark Blei who is in International Business Development for Dynamic Logic Inc and the author of this blog. None of the content of this article is meant to be an opinion of Dynamic Logic, It’s parent company Millward Brown or anybody but the writer.

Traditional advertising tactics fail on social networks September 3, 2007

Traditional advertising tactics fail on social networks

New research suggests that most marketers continue to use traditional marketing tactics on social networking sites, and it’s affecting their return on investment.

by Helen Leggatt

Forrester Research released the results of a study last month appropriately titled “Marketing on Social Networking Sites”. The results indicated that traditional advertising techniques and microsites were still being used to “push” messages to users of these networks. However, the return on investment from these type of campaigns remains low.

“We believe that marketing needs to turn itself on its head,” said Gurval Caer, president and chief executive at marketing agency Blast Radius. “The goal should not be messaging customers, but rather should be building relationships from the first moment of a delightful experience that will make people’s lives easier, better and richer.”

Forrester found many Internet users were interested in viewing marketer’s profiles – one-third of Gen Y users and nearly half of adults. The best way to engage them on social networks was, the report said, to make use of branded viral elements and to form personal relationships as “friends”, much like “how bands promote themselves on sites like MySpace”.

Confessions of a Linkedin Network user August 22, 2007

Confessions of a Linkedin Network user
By Mark Blei
Part one of a 3 part series on Social Networking.

I am a networking junkie. It started out innocently enough, as all addictions do, when I was hired to do business development. There were certain contacts in specific companies that I wanted to access. Since at times a phone call depending on whom and when can be a little bit intrusive, I looked into expanding my then small LinkedIn network.

Through the LinkedIn network, I could find the names of various people that I wanted to get in touch with through media articles or different resources, and then send a small invitation to join my network with a brief explanation of why I was contacting them and what I did. If they accepted my invitation, I took that as a tacit approval to make the next step and reach out to them directly. This proved an excellent vehicle for me, and so as I delved deeper and deeper into expanding my network I found an interesting phenomenon. Even while keeping a closed network (meaning that I do not allow people who join my network to stroll through my list of contacts) I found a cavalcade of other people who wanted access to my network who started sending me invitations…three to four a day. What spurred these people to decide to link with me? I noticed two major and one minor subset of groups reaching out to me. People whose profiles, careers, goals or needs had no synergy with my needs or goals or experience were group one. Group two were recruiters who understandably would want to have the greatest scope of contacts even though my LinkedIn profile says very clearly that I’m not in the market for a job. And group three were the smallest fraction of my network who are my actual business contacts and or people who might be doing business with me in the future.

I can tell you that from a virtual nerd standpoint there is nothing quite so ego boosting as having hoards of people sending you invitations to simply stand in the shadow of my virtual awesomeness. But was there any way for me to take advantage of people contacting me whose goals were completely different from mine?

Is there really any value in having multiple people who really have no synergy with me hooked into my network? How much business networking is too much? Let’s look at an average day for an example.

Among the requests that I received today to join my network was a Latvian Wastewater management specialist, 4 recruiters that had nothing to do with my field at all, 6-10 job seekers who had no synergy with anything that I had ever done, and 1 or 2 connection requests that were viable contacts for my current business.

What’s the possibility that my new Latvian friend in Wastewater management will any in way, or at any time, provide something of value to me? None that I can think of, but that’s just the rub. It is frequently not the things that I can think of that turn out to be viable opportunities for me, instead, it is often things that seem to come out of left field.

A few months ago on the advice of my good friend and networking guru Vincent Wright I decided that I would take 2 hours a week and allow people within my LinkedIn network to call me up and get 15 minutes of my time to not only ask me questions about what I do, but also what I know about media in general from my various and sundry jobs and experience in the industry. I didn’t require that anyone had to have a specific opportunity for me but rather wanted to do what any good Biz Dev guy does and make friends. There are many people who have small businesses or have relatives or friends that don’t have the time or money to get the ear of someone who has any decent knowledge about online media.

Through these relationship and these brief 15 minute phone calls, people just like my Latvian Wastewater friend have introduced me to new publishers interested in my product line, new advertisers taking their first plunge into online marketing, and even agencies internationally and nationally that I had no traction in previously. As it turns out my friends have friends. And when I make friends with people they want to be friendly back and that’s where the true value of networking comes into play.

I’m one of the few people who I know who have actually drawn money out of LinkedIn. Over the last year and a half I can trace over $75,000 of direct sales that were initiated through LinkedIn contacts that I had connected with through my various networking efforts. Now keep in mind that $75,000 is certainly no great shakes in the overall amount of business that I do, but I also don’t turn away business. But what’s even more important is the potential that one of these small publishers, advertisers, or agencies will one day become a powerhouse- maybe the next P&G or maybe the next Time-Warner. All I know is that I remember the people who helped me when I was a small fish in a big pond and to this day those are the people who have my trust, and if possible, my dollars.

As a business development guy I’m not always looking for the quickest sale or the lowest hanging fruit, but I do know potential when I see it. When I see potential for long-term business I certainly feel that it’s useful for me to take a few minutes out of my day to explain the value of what I provide, so that when that first big deal comes knocking and they’re looking for some sort of third party analysis to validate the effect of the media that’s being exposed through their campaign, they will turn to me. And they do.

I now receive between 20 and 30 requests to join my network every day. I am now the official moderator of one of the LinkedIn Media forums, assisting in the development of a specific media measurement forum within LinkedIn for Dynamic Logic , and at some point early this year I officially became one of the Top 500 people to know on LinkedIn.

I have beyond a doubt reached critical mass. I am a member of
no less than 20 clubs on LinkedIn, all proudly displayed on my profile.

I also now receive daily invitations to join new business networks such as Xing, Ecadamy, and various others that go on ad infinitum, and frankly, ad nauseum.

Is LinkedIn the total sum answer to my business networking needs. No. in fact the LinkedIn model has several problem areas that I’ll get into in the last article in this series.

This posting is a personal opinion article by Mark Blei who is in International Business Development for Dynamic Logic Inc and the author of this blog. None of the content of this article is meant to be an opinion of Dynamic Logic, It’s parent company Millward Brown or anybody but the writer.

Is Facebook taking over the world? -Part two of a 3 part series on Social Networking. August 22, 2007

Is Facebook taking over the world?

By Mark Blei

Part two of a 3 part series on Social Networking.

When Facebook opened up to the general public earlier this year I decided to conduct a small experiment, to see the difference between the admittedly stodgy LinkedIn environment and a more fluid, cozier one like Facebook. So I exported my LinkedIn contacts, uploaded them into Facebook, and started sending out invitations. I very quickly realized that the one thing I needed was two Facebook accounts- one for business, and one for personal use. I certainly didn’t need my business contacts seeing any of the off-hand or off-color remarks that good friends make to each other. If you remember from my last article I’m a very well known LinkedIn user with over 2000 connections in a “closed network”, meaning that I don’t allow my contacts to go through my list or network of contacts. As of now I have 300 Facebook contacts in my business profile and that number , while significant, was still fractional compared to the amount of contacts that I had as a whole on other sites. As I sent out my first round of Facebook invitations I got an email from one of my LinkedIn contacts asking me why I was befriending him on Facebook. I explained that I wanted to see the difference between the two networks. He sent me back an email asking me how it was going. My reply to him was this. “You have been a LinkedIn contact of mine for 2 years now, and beyond the initial request to link, we’ve never spoken to each other.” Think about that for a second. Just that dialogue right there should say a lot about why other social networks should be very scared of Facebook.

Let me lay some facts on you. In Canada, where over 10% of the total Facebook population resides, one third of all Canadians are members. Not one third of all Canadians online, but one third of the entire populace of the country of Canada. There was a recent article in Techcrunch discussing whether Facebook might be the next Microsoft. I think that they will be, and here’s why. Out of those 300 + connections in my Facebook business account, I have never received one piece of unwanted mail. I can definitely tell you that I can’t say the same for LinkedIN- as a matter of fact, I get spammed by one of my LinkedIn contacts at least every day. Up until recently you couldn’t send out email to people that were not in your friend list which also means that every single person who mails you through the interface has to be pre approved by you. That is up until recently when Facebook announced that they would start allowing people to email outside the interface. But still, because of the way the interface is set up it’s virtually impossible for someone to spam me. That’s right not one email trying to get me to use V1@G7A or any of the various other scams that spammers pull. And that’s actually very pleasant.

The open application development area is in its infancy, and while I’m swamped with invitations to become a zombie or werewolf, or to load or use any number of childish and stupid applications, Facebook allows people to design applications which only work in the Facebook environment. And while the zombie application might be nothing but annoying, six months from now when a new application for a shared calendar is developed that allows small companies to not only share appointments but perhaps share spreadsheets, files, PowerPoint presentations etc., Facebook is going to be a major contender in the marketplace, in part because their applications cannot be used on any other platform. Already there are human resources applications for recruitment companies where other people who know me can score me on the effectiveness of my work, therefore allowing possible recruiters to see how I’m thought of by other people who I’ve worked with. Already, Facebook has much the same newsreader functionality as well as the IGoogle all in a one page linkage that it took Google years to come out with.

And what’s more interesting is my wife. My wife, who, while being an internet junkie and long-term nerd, (who would you expect would have me, Kate Moss?), hates all things mainstream and pop culture. Hates them with such vehemence that when she saw me playing around with the Facebook application loudly groaned and exclaimed “Oh, no- not another stupid social network tool.”

My wife now spends a significant portion of her day turning people into Pirates, sending virtual drinks, and writing notes on the walls of her friends who live within blocks of us. I don’t think that my wife is the exception- I think that she’s the norm. And I think that we should all be watching Facebook to see what they are going to do in the future. It may just be the next “killer app.” if you have a thought then please leave it on this blog or …look me up on Facebook.

This posting is a personal opinion article by Mark Blei who is in International Business Development for Dynamic Logic Inc and the author of this blog. None of the content of this article is meant to be an opinion of Dynamic Logic, It’s parent company Millward Brown or anybody but the writer.

Has Social Networking Reached Critical Mass? Part three of a 3 part series on Social Networking. August 22, 2007

Has Social Networking Reached Critical Mass?
Part three of a 3 part series on Social Networking.
By Mark Blei

Facebook, MySpace, Xing, Ecademy, Plaxo, Yahoo360, and the various and sundry failed Orkut type websites out there... I get invited to these every day. Today alone I was invited to two new social networks that I had not heard of before. One of them, called Quechup, which I luckily did not join, automatically harvests every email address in your files, and without permission spams everyone you know with invitations to join. ( That Link does not go to Quechup) Is there room for more than one social network for both business and personal use?

Probably. But just like six years ago when we had a host of search engines available to us- Excite, Lycos, Dogpile, Yahoo, Hotbot, and the new and upstart strangely named Google, the herd has a way of thinning itself out. How many of you even bother with anything more than Google, Yahoo, or the Microsoft search product if you need to search for something? When was the last time that you looked at a MySpace profile? The last time that I did any looking around that site, aside from noticing that Tom was a pretty popular guy, I noticed profiles that were pimped out so much that they were completely unreadable, profiles that blare music wantonly, waking up my entire house when I hit them. I do not think that the answer is necessarily allowing people to do whatever they want on their profile. Now I know that MySpace is not necessarily going after the 30 plus 50k demographic very heavily, but think about where the money is.

I do think that when I talk about Facebook ruling the world in terms of social networking that they have a very good chance of doing that, and I believe that all other social networks if they want to survive the next few years of the culling process should beware. If I find the experience of being on your website to be unpleasant, visually difficult, and intrusive, then I’m not only going to refuse to join that network, I won’t even bother visiting links that people send me on that network. If Google Video did not allow you to view MySpace videos within the Google Video portal there would never be any bandwidth dedicated to MySpace again from my PC.

LinkedIn, formerly the leader of business networking, has had long-standing customer service issues for even people paying the highest of premiums. And also, what is now being widely known as the “LinkedIn Lockout”. Well, ok it’s not really widely known as “LinkedIn Lockout” but I had to put a name to it and I thought it sounded cool. Who knows it might catch on.Pardon me if I’m wrong, but from my understanding, the purpose of networking sites like LinkedIn is to enable you to meet new people that you would otherwise not know in order to determine if there is any business synergy and to engage in possible deals. LinkedIn, in their wisdom, decided that they would put both an option within their invitations for the recipient to indicate that they did not know the person who was inviting them, and also made a rule saying that if 5 people pressed that button indicating that they didn’t know me, that I would lose my privileges to invite people into my network on LinkedIn, thereby effectively stagnating it. Of course they don’t know me. If they had known me, I wouldn’t have had to use the darned tool to send them an invitation to invite them to get to know me. If I had had their email address or phone number I would have contacted them that way. What’s worse is that once you enter the LinkedIn Lockout Zone, it’s virtually impossible to regain your invitation privileges.

This hasn’t happened to me because I only send invitations to those people who I know would have at least a name recognition of my company if not me, and people who while may not always be customers of mine are certainly by both our standards good candidates to be customers. Like any salesperson I don’t waste my time reaching out to unqualified people. But even if you have an existing list of contacts you can still get locked out! It’s happened enough that it’s already hit the Blogosphere like in this post by Blogger Scott Allen.Also, there is no real difference between a free membership on LinkedIn versus the top-level membership which costs almost $50 U.S. a month other than more chances to get yourself locked out of the system by trying to meet new people.

Meanwhile, easy to use applications like Xing are growing exponentially. Plaxo, who entered the social networking market earlier this month, is already a product that almost every person in my industry uses in one form or another, and has used for at least the past four years. I know 2 people who don’t use the Plaxo network, and that’s it. One is my wife and the other is my IT guy ( and I’m pretty sure my IT guy was lying to me). When Plaxo released their social networking tool, within 24 hours I received over 100 invitations from people within my Plaxo contact list to join the Plaxo Business Network. LinkedIn should be shivering in fear.

Is there room for more than one social networking tool? There may be. Look at the last 10 internet searches that you did. How many were on Google? How many were on Lycos? Social networking sites should learn from the past and realize that even the most savvy web-users are willing to give up a good deal, up to and including their privacy, for a good, reliable functionality, and dependable results. If we don’t learn from the past, it will only repeat itself.

This posting is a personal opinion article by Mark Blei who is in International Business Development for Dynamic Logic Inc and the author of this blog. None of the content of this article is meant to be an opinion of Dynamic Logic, It’s parent company Millward Brown or anybody but the writer.

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