Linkedin: Creep Like a Professional

I was browsing through Linkedin today trying to get a better feel for the marketing and e-commerce industry when I realized why its so important that your settings allow you to be recognized when you've viewed somebody's profile. Furthermore the reason behind this is the central difference between how our generation networks on Facebook and how they should adapt their networking philosophy to Linkedin. Before I get into it let me briefly explain the setting options:

1. Totally Anonymous

It is what it sounds like. You will be browsing completely anonymously and nobody will have a clue you've viewed their profile.

2. Anonymous With Profile Characteristics

This option keeps your profile anonymous while sharing general characteristics about you. For example if mine where on that setting and I viewed your profile it would read "Your profile was viewed by: Someone in the Intern function in the Marketing and Advertising industry from Greater New York City Area"

3. Your Name and Headline

This option means if I view your profile my full name and headline will be displayed and you could follow that link to view my profile.



Initially when I got a Linkedin profile I kept my settings to either anonymous or anonymous with profile characteristics. I did this for the same reason you probably have those settings right now...you don't want to look like a creep. With the sudden rush of connectivity in our society one of the most frowned upon characteristics a person can have is being downright creepy. Some of the most popular Facebook scams are the "do such and such and see whose viewed your profile" because we are all so interested in who's creepin' on us.

As a generation of Facebook users we have certain networking instincts that are deeply embedded in all of us. The goal of Facebook is to maintain your social brand...aka not look like a dork. This requires maintaining a degree of exclusivity and self image. For Facebook users trying to build their professional brand on Linkedin it is important to recognize the difference between the goals of each and how to go about them.



On Linkedin the goal is to expand your professional brand and network. The more attention you can draw to yourself the better. Obviously some of the core principles of Facebook networking still apply. Don't spam people or overwhelm them with inappropriate content. Don't say or do anything you wouldn't like to be held accountable for. The essential difference is that you are trying to reach as many people as possible, namely, people that can help you get a job. This is particularly true for young aspiring professionals (the general audience of this blog). Over my two years here at Geneseo I rapidly learned that if I want to do something outside an introductory finance job in the Rochester area I better learn to network and do so aggressively. Linkedin has proven to be my most effective tool for doing so.

So why change your settings to announce how creepy you are? The second part of the answer is rooted in a basic web traffic/e-commerce principle. Think of your Linkedin as a store that sells your brand. You can find heaping servings of Mark Dougherty here on my Linkedin profile. Instead of your storefront being on the street with a door leading in its on the web with links leading in. The more "doors" you can create leading into your storefront the more potential customers (aka employers) you can let in. When creeping around the division of that company you are interested why not leave a trail of doors leading to your storefront? Maybe they'll think your a Linkedin nerd. I'll be the first to admit to such a title. However, employers aren't looking for bros to help them get their drink on, their looking for competent individuals who make themselves marketable and easy to find.

Let the Face-commerce Begin!

We all knew it was inevitable. Today Facebook launched a program called "Deals" which enables users to shop through Facebook. The program is being tested in five cities (San Francisco, Austin, Dallas, Atlanta and San Diego) and offers steep discounts similarly to the group buying sites mentioned in my previous post The Rebirth of Student Discounts Through Collective Buying. I anticipate this to be a major threat to overnight group buying sensations Groupon and Living Social. Imagine the dismay of finding out there is a rival service that already hast 600 million members in addition to an endless quantifiable amount of their personal information and behavior patterns. Looks like we'll find out if Groupon can live up to the hype and if people are willing to let Facebook dominate yet another aspect of their lives.

The Rebirth of Student Discounts Through Collective Buying

Now here's a website I can get behind. CollegeBudget.com offers MASSIVE discounts of 90-50% off exclusively to college students. I was turned on to this site by a kid who sits next to me in my Humanities class. As luck would have it I was in the market for a protective laptop case/sleeve and right on the site was a deal for laptop cases 63% off. Sadly for you this deal ended at 12 o'clock last night, which is part of the kicker. Each day College Budget lists a handful of deals that go up only for a few days, if not just one. Selling such deeply discounted products requires insuring you sell enough to make some profit. For this reason the deals on CollegeBudget.com have "tipping points" or a certain number of orders required for the sale to happen. This is reminiscent of my previous post about Quirky.com where a certain number of customers must commit to purchasing an invention before it can be sold. These types for deals are known as group buying. The good people at CollegeBudget.com aren't the first to conjure up such an idea.

Group or collective buying was originated in the People's Republic of China. Instead of buying through large mega deal sites like Groupon, collective buying emerged through a handful of individuals approaching online retailers as a group in an attempt to use leverage to haggle for a lower price. The idea has since made its way to America and sites like Groupon and Living Social have been making a killing over the past few years. Two years after starting Groupon in November of 2008 its owners flat out denied an offer from Google for the company for $6 billion dollars. While the deals group buying sites offer excite buyers and allow smaller companies to reach millions of customers, they yield little revenue for the companies that participate. By making such deals available to customers are companies expanding their customer base or just training their customers not to tolerate anything less than 50% off? Only time (and retail price reorder rates of group buying customers) will tell.

Awesome Chat Roulette Video

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Boys, Girls and Perverts

While reading my friend Maggie's Blog I came across this video on a new channel of social media I hadn't heard of called chat roulette. The general idea is that you are randomly connected to a stranger with a web cam who you can talk with. If one of you doesn't want to talk to the other you can click next and are then immediately connected to a new stranger. The video does a great (and funny) job of explaining this additional reason for parents to be neurotic about their children's internet access.

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

Here is yet another gem from Maggie's blog that I love. Sure she's just a pretty 19 year old girl blogging about nothing specific, but according to chat roulette that mean's she is 90% more interesting than I am.

The Long Tail, Making Your Life Awesome Since 2004

Pretty Lights: Finally Moving  by  md9

Actually the long tail has been progressively making all our lives a little more awesome each year in varying degrees for the past ten or so years, but that wouldn't have made for nearly as bitchin' a title. (alright, maybe not bitchin' but at least moderately more catchy) I went with the year 2004 because that's when it was first defined by editor and chief of Wired magazine Chris Anderson in his appropriately titled book "The Long Tail". The long tail lets businesses please more people and make more money while allowing us, the consumers, to celebrate our individuality at little to no additional cost. It accounts for innumerable positive aspects of our day to day lives and yet we seldom even stop to thank it. At this point I know what you are thinking "Mark, enough with the foreplay, just tell us what it is already!" Fine, but there is no need to hypothetically yell at me on my own blog.

The long tail refers to the theory that our culture and economy is shifting away from a system of high sales of a few items to low sales of LOTS of items. High sales of a few items means customers have a limited amount of choices. Low sales of lots of items means companies can target/satisfy a plethora of niche (small, specific) markets. Serving a specific market is traditionally very expensive. It requires storing and distributing its own set of goods. Over the past few years the internet has made distributing products exponentially cheaper, therefore allowing companies to reach more niche markets.




A classic example of the long tail model is Netflix. Netflix, simply known to Blockbuster as "the grim reaper", has taken the movie rental market by storm. Because Netflix doesn't have to fill thousands of storefronts with every title it carries it can offer a much wider range of titles at no cost to them from one place. Now instead of running the risk that nobody will want to rent "All Dogs Go to Heaven 2", and buying a couple thousand copies of it, Netflix can purchase one copy and make it available to every customer via the internet. Since the marginal cost of renting another movie is practically nothing, Netflix can allow its users to watch as many movies as they want and only have to charge a small monthly fee to pay the nerds who run the website. In 2007 Netflix announced that it has 85,000 available titles. I don't know how many you can find at your local Blockbuster (if you can still find a local Blockbuster) but I'm sure its a very small fraction of that.

The internet has been continuously making distribution so cheap that anyone can get their product out there if there is a corresponding niche market that might like it. My two favorite examples of this are the artist Pretty Lights and comedian Bo Burnham. Both produce excellent products that lack mass appeal but have found their niche markets by using the internet's cheap distribution. Pretty Lights has achieved fame by charging everyone's favorite price for his music, free. At PrettyLightsMusic.com you can download the entire Pretty Lights discography for absolutely nothing. Since his product only appeals to a small niche market he is making sure he reaches as many people within that market as possible. Even though he might make a few bucks of some people willing pay for his music, he makes more money through all the additional live shows his increased market presence demands. Enough said? Fine, here's more Pretty Lights

Pretty Lights: Let Em Know It's Time To Go  by  md9

Comedian Bo Burnham has also benefited from the cheap (aka free) distribution of the internet. He started out posting YouTube videos of his songs in high school that went viral and got him tons of exposure. Unlike most YouTube stars, Bo has actually made a career of it, staring in his own Comedy Central Presents special and having an album in stores. Here's him singing about the site that made him who he is.




One of those Youtube songs that created the buzz.

Whopper Sacrifice

Earlier this year Burger King launched a marketing campaign that I absolutely loved called the "Whopper Sacrifice". The idea behind it was that for every ten Facebook friends a person deleted they would get a free Whopper. This campaign brings up an interesting point. How much are your Facebook friends worth to you? Everyone loves to pretend they don't care about how many "virtual" friends they have but if this were true we would all have cashed in our friends for a delicious heap of flame broiled (and then briefly microwaved) Whoppers. Facebook friends are a valued currency but the question is what kind?

The more Facebook friends a person has, the more influence they posses over the Faecbook world. For instance, since I usually post links to new blog entries on Facebook, the amount of traffic this blog receives is directly influenced by my number of Facebook friends. This currency is less monetary as it is reputational. An increase in friends equates to an increase in overall social capital. This is why Chris Anderson describes Facebook as the world's largest closed market of reputational currency. A blogger named Jason Kottke used the Whopper Sacrifice to estimate Facebook's overall value.

"Facebook has 150 million users and the average user has 100 friends. Each friendship requires the assent of both friends so really each user can, on average only get credit for ending half of their friendships. The price of a Whopper is approximately $2.40. That means that each user's friendship is worth around 5 Whoppers, or $12. Do the math and:

$12/user x 150M users= $1.8 billion valuation for Facebook."

I ask anyone who reads this to leave a monetary value for what it would be worth for them to not lose 100 Facebook friends. For me personally I would say it is around $15-$20.

Social Media

I would like to thank everyone who commented back on what a horrible person I am and how disgusted they were, it really meant a lot to me. Two of my favorite comments being;
"I'm disgusted and outraged, my fists will tell you so the next time we meet" and
"That cant be real. She must have been photoshoped in there."



Recently "social media" has been tearing through the business world like a Dane Cook album through a middle school. As far as buzzwords go, social media seems to be the Twilight to Globalization's Harry Potter. Everyone loves to talk about what a significant revolution it is but how many really understand it? Yesterday after a lecture about social media given by my marketing professor I was talking to him about starting this blog and linking it on Facebook. "ah very good, blogs ... facebook...social media..." However after further discussing the idea of statuses, comments, and how to reach various sub-networks within social networks it became increasingly obvious that he had no idea what I was talking about or how social networking sites really worked.

Today almost all "cutting edge" products have Facebook pages but still seem to miss the mark. Social media is not just about traditional marketing ideals of increased exposure but direct interaction with both individuals and communities.
How much more does the marketing head of Nike really understand social media than the thirteen year old members of Dane Cook's Facebook group fan site?

Most Good Blogs Probably Don't Start With Apologies

I should probably start this blog off by apologizing to everyone who followed the link I posted on Facebook with the warning "EXTREMELY MATURE AND OFFENSIVE CONTENT!!!" While somewhat deceitful and certainly a moral gray area you must admit it was successful considering you are here reading it. As an experiment in viral marketing I ask anyone who reads this to respond to the Facebook post with a comment about how offended and upset you were by said hypothetical content. Even if you are disapointed or embarassed by this deceit you might was well drag as many people down with you as possible. If nothing else this is an observation of the tipping point between where people consider an action and actually follow through with it.

I've never written a blog before and have always been somewhat self-conscious about the idea of it. However after visiting MarkDougherty.blogspot.com and discovering that not only does it already exist but is headed off by some sort of poem about impotent salmon (read for yourself) I figure my reputation amidst the blogosphere can only improve.

If you know me at all (or have read the description under the title) you already have a good idea as to the content of this blog. I will try to keep it as relevant and interesting as possible for both your benefit and my-self esteem's.