LinkedIn, the professional contact social network, is somewhat in the shadow of its much more visible rivals Facebook, Myspace or - recently - Twitter. For business users LinkedIn is in my opinion the strongest public social network tool I can think of. I also tried out XING, its German rival, but dropped it after finding little other than job seekers in it. LinkedIn on the other hand becomes a very very strong tool once you have 100+ or so contacts as you can then get in contact via InMail with many people that you might want to do business with. And with every new contact you sign on the network grows exponentially. What most people don’t know is that LinkedIn was started also by a German: Konstantin Guericke. Recently LinkedIn has been trying to also include more social communication features such as e.g. a status line on what you are working on.

I think they could easily also include more of what Facebook and Twitter have to offer and with that get the network growing some more. One key difference is that LinkedIn are far less willing to share their API with developers; this may be a benefit in some ways but it does limit the ways that LinkedIn can be tied into the user’s life. Another way they might expand is that they could start a LinkedIn Junior or something like that to attract younger folks as well. But whichever way you look at it, LinkedIn is a big success story and all the folks who have been involved deserve a lot of respect.

Recently I have been hearing in various places that print news were recovering, triggering comments of relief (from the newspapers) that predictions that everything was heading online were obviously not correct. I had a smile on my face when I read that, and it reminded me of a short-term assignment I had more than ten years ago with Bertelsmannn BMG in Hong Kong, where I had to plan for a data center for their AsiaPac countries. BMG was already thinking then about distributing music over the Internet and for that purpose went into the Internet access business. They formed a joint venture with - at that time market leader - AOL and even built their own country-wide access networks in Germany, as well as buying providers in other countries. Of course they did not realize that the Internet is a shared medium and it therefore did not make too much sense to buy it like a print or CD manufacturing plant.  Back to Hong Kong: as the data center did not seem to make economic sense at the time I suggested to them that I help with setting up an online music sales operation testing the waters in the AsiaPac region first (at that time dial-up was still to be found everywhere). Despite their investment into the AOL joint venture and into whole country IP networks (in Hong Kong we had the option to buy Hong Kong SuperNet, the city’s first and largest ISP) they looked quite puzzled about my offering and had one question only: how do we protect ourselves from illegal pirate downloads and distributions? My response was that there are technical methods even if not all can be protected, but most importantly we cannot sit and wait until it happens anyway. So still they turned the idea down and I moved on as well…

By now we all know what happened: a fruit company from Cupertino sells more than 50% of all music online and is taking the profits. Not only Bertelsmann BMG but all the other music labels lost the race to a company that had no idea about the music label business and its distribution at all.

So while the music industry shift online is done and one company dominates it, I am convinced we will see the same in the print media. And it looks like it might be the same fruit company eying for it. Read I. Cringley’s latest article on this, providing more background info. Interesting to read that he had the exact same experience in the print publication industry (in 1994 already) that I had in the music industry. History repeats itself, it seems, telling us that if you wait too long someone else will come and take that opportunity.

On my way back from a business trip I read a good article in the Economist, “Some companies are finding opportunities in the recession”. They mention four types of ways how companies take advantage of the current downturn to come out even stronger afterwards:

• take advantage of bargain-basement prices to make acquisitions (PepsiCo bought two of their biggest bottling companies, paying $6 billion)
• invest heavily into innovation (Intel’s Craig Barrett “you can’t save your way out of a recession; you have to invest your way out”; P&G is doing its biggest expansion in the company history opening 19 new factories around the world and IBM is holding a series of “innovation jams” to find new innovation ideas)
• companies reposition themselves (Cisco is buying startups, moving into services and expanding its business portfolio away from a pure network hardware provider)
• and last, but not least, entire new companies are being formed, following in the footsteps of others that were also started during recessions, such as FedEx, CNN and Microsoft

Update: nice slide from Phil Kotler on this subject.

While there are some signs of recovery, it seems a slow moving process and many companies are still having a hard time planning their budgets for longer than just a few months ahead. Also the question comes up what to do in marketing. Will people even be open to what you do? Or should you save that money entirely?

Tools that I feel will still work are:

• video casts of products, your company; insightful interviews of your customers (needs someone doing the interviews who understands your business otherwise will be worthless small talk or high-level surface scratching); and something that you can try out as well are animated presentations with spoken text. This is easier to do as you don’t need video interview skills.
• virtual events: as VMWare and others have shown, you can increase the audience by 3-5x with a virtual event site that gives every participating company their own space. When travel costs are being cut, that seems the way to still have people engaged even if they might not physically attend the event
• interactive sites, if you are able to hook your target group with interesting discussions on hot subjects in your product market this should draw attention; and if you manage to get many to even leave comments, you have achieved the best one can expect from a product marketing tool. These social community sites require very careful and skilled planning, though. Also cultural aspects inside and outside your company need to be taken into account. You cannot just buy a community software tool and set it all up in a week. While technically possible, it will definitely not fly. Still, many software vendors try to make you believe a community is just another simple collaboration tool like chatting or project collaboration. But it is simply not so!
• fun sells: it requires a bit of courage to use fun elements such as cartoons but, if you do, it will draw attention. It’s important that the fun is linked with what you do and not simply a general cartoon or joke
• webinars save people the time and expense of attending a seminar but, as with e-newsletters, I feel though there are many webinars offered, maybe too many? The beauty is nevertheless that you need only one participant and it is still worth doing as also on your side the cost is minimal. So I would try them still. Maybe you get some initial prospects. Be aware though that you need to do a personal invitation as well, which means more than sending out a general e-mail to your e-mail list!
• banner ads: if you want to make them effective then you need to spend a good amount of money making them very big and displaying them on highly trafficked sites where you expect your target group to go. A small banner ad next to half a dozen others will not be worth the money you have spent.

Tools that seem to have lost its magic:

• e-newsletters, I get much less than a few years ago when everyone sent out a newsletter and really expected that people would read them. I think they don’t unless you have something super interesting to say. Also if you do it it needs to be done very well incl. the design. The standard e-newsletters are not good enough. There are better ways now too such as RSS or community sites to do the same or even better.
• e-mailings, I think with RSS e-mailing campaigns have lost their raison d’aitre. Still there are many out who still spam the inboxes of their target groups. More annoying than effective I would think unless, again, it is a personal email but that is hard to do.

Update: and a more generic slide on Marketing 3.0 from Phil Kotler.

I have been using Evernote now for quite a while, primarily to organize the weekly and daily tasks. Also whenever I have a new idea I write it down as a note and sync it when there is WLAN access available, like at my home or in the office. Evernote has evolved form a simple note taking tool to an archiving system and how this looks has been described by Guy Kawasaki at length. I don’t think I will use all of these things but perhaps you will find some of them useful? Forwarding e-mails to my Evernote e-mail address and with that archiving them is something I have decided to do now.  Here’s a summary of all the things you can do:

• Forward email to your unique Evernote email address.
• Upload text, photo, or voice recordings via an iPhone, Palm Pre, or Windows Mobile phone.
• Drag-and-drop audio, images, PDFs, and files into Evernote on the desktop.
• Attach Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF documents to an email and send them to your Evernote email address.
• “Save PDF to Evernote” from the printing dialog box.
• Clip websites and blogs.
• Send documents directly from a scanner.
• Tweet text with the string “@myEN”.
• Upload from cameras directly to Evernote using the wireless EyeFi card.

Who would have forecast only a few years ago that Dell would drive the innovation of laptop technology forward? Dell was well known for me-too, high-powered professional laptops for a relatively good price. Up until they ran into support problems and the “Dell is hell” story made its round, hurting the company quite a bit. Now that Michael Dell is back he seems to be doing a lot of great things. Firstly they started using social communities for innovation as well as for tech support, which also appears to have had a great effect on the culture of the company. And now they have announced the Latitude Z, which is full of great innovation. It is pricey still, but in a short amount of time I am sure this will all become more affordable as always.

Watch this:

Seth Godin caught my interest once more with an article, this time on how to do business development successfully. I think he is mostly right on. Take a look yourself…

This video here was also posted on Techcrunch yesterday. While it is intended to be funny, I think it contains a bit of truth. Question now is if this is done totally on purpose as sort of unconscious brainwashing of everyone listening to this or if the Apple folks simply don’t know any other adjectives than:

great    easy    awesome   incredible    amazing

Or, and that is certainly a good part of it too, they are highly passionate and excited about their own work, which is one of the best sales and marketing attributes you can have.

Today the breaking news in the tech industry was that the Skype founders sued eBay for patent infringement in the U.S. for the astonishing amount of 75 million USD per day. Now that eBay decided to sell Skype to another consortium of investors instead of the Skype founders, it looks like they went wild and pulled the trigger on what they must have been already using as a pressure point against eBay for quite some time.

Personally, I really do not care much about the full story behind all this, or whether this claim has any merit or not. What puzzles me much more is that these guys, after they made a killing selling Skype for 3 bn USD are now suing the exact same company that made them stinking rich. Maybe I am not enough of a hard core  take-it-all-when-you-can business guy, but actually I rather feel sorry for them as they seem to have lost touch with reality. In fact I once had very high respect for them as one of the only really BIG European tech startup success stories, but I have lost that respect entirely now. I guess the bottom line lesson learned here must be that money does not necessarily make people happy .

What else could people do on 9/9/2009, other than get married? That’s probably what Dell’s PR folks were thinking. In December 2008 they unveiled the original Adamo laptop but without much media buzz at the time. Now this week on September 9, a new Adamo was shown that measures 9.99mm in height, making it the thinnest laptop. Compare this with Apple’s MacBook Air which is 19.3mm high and you see that it must be unbelievably thin. Some folks who had their hands on a it were amazed about it. see here

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