Posts filed under 'LinkedIn'
By Ben Haber
With so many social networks, sometimes it can be difficult to figure out where to post content and information. It’s important to remember that each social network has a different audience, and they want and expect (and react to) different types of content. How do you figure out which social network to post different types of content on? Let this amazing flow chart guide you…
Click on the chart to expand.
But in all seriousness, it is crucial to treat each social network differently, because your connections will vary on each, and so will the information your connections are interested in receiving from you. So unlink your Twitter handle to the other networks (except perhaps LinkedIn) and give each social network some personalized attention, so show them they you know who they are, and want to engage with them.
November 2nd, 2011
By Ben Haber
The valuation of social networks has always been a tricky subject. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn and others have been valued very highly at certain times, even though some aren’t yet profitable, and many not even have any revenue.
However, this morning LinkedIn officially IPO’d at $45 a share, and the stock price immediately shot up to over $100 per share (as I write this, it’s hovering around $110). While this gigantic share price leap is agonizing for shareholders that sold stock at $45, Facebook has to be watching this occur with a giant smile.
As the big dog in the social media world, Facebook not only is a stable of today’s life, but a very profitable company at this point. They’ve figured out how to turn their massive amount of data and information into a growing revenue stream and attract advertisers that want to directly reach their target audience. When (someday) Mark Zuckerberg and company decide it is time to IPO, they know with absolute certainty that their stock price is going to go through the roof, and will be one of the most highly anticipated IPOs in history.
May 19th, 2011
By Guest Author
This is a guest post from RJ Bardsley, a Senior Vice at Racepoint Group. Follow him on Twitter @RJBardsley.
If you’re on the West Coast and just waking up, run, don’t walk to your nearest news source. What you’ll find is a blistering barrage of news from some of the biggest and coolest tech brands this morning. Here is a quick run down of what hit the Wall Street Journal today.
- Microsoft buys Skype for $8 billion. This is the biggest-ever acquisition for Microsoft. Can they make it work? It makes sense – Skype will add a lot to MSFT’s gaming and communications platforms.
- Google Unveils Web Music Service… uh, watch out Apple? I don’t know about that, but Amazon and Spotify may be shaking in their boots a little bit. Google still has to secure licenses from the four major record labels. Expect the system to operate like a remote hard drive.
- Apple and Google will both testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on mobile privacy. Yes, location-based information is really neat, but it turns out people don’t really like it when you know where they are all the time…
- LinkedIn set the terms for its IPO: how does $3 billion+ sound? This could be the first in a flood of US tech IPOs. Expect Groupon to follow suit later this year and Facebook maybe next year. Freescale, the chip company also set price terms for its IPO yesterday. Can you say 1998?
- Silicon Valley wild child, NVIDIA, also announced an acquisition this week. It bought Icera, a UK start up focused on baseband chips. The move will make NVIDIA more of a competitive force in the mobile phone market.
- Gilt, the online luxury retailer (and @rdeplazes’s frequent digital haunt) has raised $138 million form investors. Yeah, I guess you really can say 1998…
- Video game maker Activision announced a 32% jump in sales.
- Apple and Conde Nast announced that many of your favorite media outlets – including Wired, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Allure, Self, GQ, and my personal favorite, Golf Digest – will be available for subscription on the iTunes store. Yey.
May 10th, 2011
By Ben Haber
LinkedIn is personally thanking its first 1 million members, with emails directly from co-founder and chairman, Reid Hoffman (a copy of the letter is below).
As you may recall, Facebook launched a big ‘thank you’ effort when whey crossed the 5 million barrier, and LinkedIn is clearly following their example by making this big milestone about their users rather than the service. It’s a classy thing to do.
(click on the image to enlarge the letter)
March 25th, 2011
By Ben Haber
During an audio conference today run by Bulldog Reporter, a panel of six journalists were asked how they prefer to be contacted. The most popular answers were email and Twitter, while Facebook and LinkedIn received a mixed reaction. However, there was one method of communication was unanimously condemned: the telephone.
One common request from the panel was to only call a reporter if you have a good relationship with them. The message was about establishing relationships before jumping on the phone, because that’s how things get accomplished – through relationships. So here is my question: Don’t you think the best way to really get to know someone is by talking to them (with words, not text)? While email and Twitter allows you to communicate, there is no replacement for meeting someone in-person or speaking with them directly. It’s more personal and can establish an honest and good-working relationship quickly and effectively.
While I understand reporters don’t want to be called non-stop because it can be extremely disruptive, if a PR person knows they have a good story I don’t understand why a phone call signals the end of the world. Sure, it’s great to have the information on record via email, but what’s wrong with a quick introduction that shows the reporter you have read their stories, know their interests, and that your pitch is not a mail merge?
Another interesting topic was to see how many reporters were open to being pitched via Twitter, because some are clearly opposed to this idea. However, one panelist said that Twitter pitching was fine as long as it was through DM so that the pitch was private. But, since you can only pitch someone via DM if they are following you that creates a problem. Sure, you can work to establish a relationship to the point that someone will follow you, but that doesn’t always work. There is one one journalist that I have corresponded with via Twitter for several months and I have a very interesting story idea for. However, despite listing me in a #followfriday tweet a few weeks ago, she is still not following me, so I can’t DM her. Maybe Twitter needs a separate DM function for journalists that allows them to receive DMs from users they aren’t following.
While I have rambled on in this post I have been having a reoccurring question that I present to you: has social media made us less social? It appears that we are eliminating phone calls and one-on-one interactions in favor or posting a Tweet or Facebook message? How does this strengthen relationships? Sure, I know what Brian is having for lunch today (he lives in San Francisco and I’ve never spoken with him – actually, I don’t even know what he looks like), but does that really matter? During phone calls other aspects of life come up like weekend plans and what trade the Red Sox should make. This makes people human and establishes relationships.
My message is not that social media is bad. It’s a great thing. My message is that its important not to get so caught up in social media that we lose sight of other important things, like phone calls.
July 9th, 2009
By Kyle Austin
As I mentioned yesterday, a large drop in ad sales at MySpace means that social network ad sales will fall 3% this year. However, according to Blake Boznanski, an Ad Sales Executive at LinkedIn (who visited Racepoint’s San Francisco office yesterday), the “business relationship” social network is still very bullish about ad growth – less than a year after launching its own ad network for the site.
LinkedIn, who officially launched its ad network last September (a year after Facebook), has launched a variety of new paid and non-paid tools for marketers over the last several months (along with a site re-design) in an effort to take advantage of the shift towards social media marketing.
LinkedIn’s key differentiator is its demographic. More than a quarter of which are senior executives. Another quarter of which are “professional networkers” who rank high in social network influence. Compare this with the demographics of Facebook and the masses that visit its site. Sure, LinkedIn is around 1/7 the size of Facebook in terms of users, but I’d make the print analogy that LinkedIn is the Wall Street Journal to Facebook’s USA Today. Like the Journal, a large group of LinkedIn’s demographic have six-figure salaries and high purchasing power. In fact, LinkedIn is one of the top destinations on the Web for those with a college degree.
Some of the relatively new features, which LinkedIn has rolled out over the last year to allow marketers to target this demographic of prospective customers, includes: customized applications and appplication sponsorship, Q&A sponsorship, group sponsorship, partnership messages, poll programs and group sponsorships.
LinkedIn currently hosts apps from companies such as SlideShare, Google and Tripit and is open to collaborating on additional customized applications with additional advertisers / brands. In addition, there is an opportunity for marketers to sponsor third party apps and event apps. For instance, the application from Tripit, which lets you see where and when your LinkedIn network is traveling, has created sponsorship opportunities on the site for hotels and airlines. The same sponsorship opportunity exists for the 10,000 plus events that are now listed on LinkedIn.
Poll partnerships have also become a new way for brands to connect with LinkedIn’s demographic. The most widely known partnership being LinkedIn’s deal with CNBC, which has drawn huge engagement from the LinkedIn community. Under the agreement, CNBC has also become LinkedIn’s preferred business media provider and offers CNBC articles, blogs, financial data, and video content to LinkedIn’s user base – in exchange for the community-generated content (LinkedIn / CNBC polls) exclusively provided for CNBC.
Group pages are growing in popularity (nearly 300,000 of them) on LinkedIn and have added recent features that allow group managers to send an announcement via email to their group members. This, combined with applications and RSS feeds pushing content into these group / fan pages has created a rich / vibrant community to advertise within. Brands can sponsor a federation of user created groups or target users of specific groups throughout LinkedIn.
Another feature that is growing in popularity is featured question functionality that can be promoted throughout the LinkedIn community. Featured questions from executive leaders or “brand celebrities” allow brands to engage with the community, create dialogue and gain further insight. For instance, Garry Kelly, Southwest Airline’s CEO, recently used the question feature to ask how an airline can make people more productive and was greeted with numerous responses that he and the community could view.
As for its “basic” display and text ads, Boznanski noted that LinkedIn still handles all of its ad placements, unlike other social networks that have outsourced to other ad networks. This, he says, “allows LinkedIn to target better.” LinkedIn supports text-based ads and display ads (300×250, 150×600, 728×90 and video). It also only allows a limited amount of ads per page, giving advertisers a bigger “share of page.” All of this has led to speculation that LinkedIn has a CPM in the range of $75 for targeted / customized advertising. Comparatively, Facebook CPM rates for display ads on the destination site are rumored to be in the $0.50 – $1 range and advertising within social apps on Facebook are going for CPM’s as low as $0.12.
On the earned media / non-paid side of things, brands can continue to create viral dialogue by using the status update feature, poll creation (not distributed or promoted as widely without advertising investment), group creation, corporate page updates (i.e. adding applications) and participation within the answers feature. All of these features also assist LinkedIn with creating more engagement with its user base.
Although LinkedIn may have been assisted on its current growth pattern by the economic climate and people searching for jobs, Boznanski noted that LinkedIn’s steady growth began in advance of the recession and they expect it to continue beyond the end of the recession – as they look to expand their ad sales business and overall community growth.
May 14th, 2009
