Category Archives: Business At The Speed Of Thought

Finding the money, dreaming big and spending small

Twitter Captures WSJ And Mainstream Business

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

In case you are asking yourself if your business or association is ready to start tweeting, you can stop asking.

Even the high, conservative guru of business, the Wall Street Journa,l is not only reporting on tweeting but is tweeting itself. http://twitter.com/WSJ

As WSJ.com as reported on the Twitter phenomenon infiltrating mainstream America:

“Doctors are using Twitter to update patients about office hours. Local groups such as the Los Angeles Fire Department are using it to share details about service calls with interested residents, occasionally with graphic descriptions of the victims’ conditions. And dozens of major companies, like computer maker Dell Inc., use Twitter to share deals and product news with people who sign up for the service.” They also report on a mobile Korean taco business, selling spicy Bar-b-que tacos getting 400 customers in customers at night by tweeting out their location.”

Is there anything Tweet can’t do? Perform brain surgery? Tweet out Hamlet in snippets?

Well, kidding aside, that still leaves plenty it can do, and what it can do for your business can be pretty amazing. For the basics, go to Using Twitter For Business

Tell us how you’re using Twitter, and we’ll start a dialogue of people or businesses with interesting Twitter uses.

How to use twitter for business (demandmetric.com)
Using Twitter for business: Engaging your customers online (publicrelationssydney.com.au)
Twitter Ramps Up Sales Team, Hiring from Yelp, YouTube (louisgray.com)

Extraordinary Women: Transforming Beijing

During Women’s History Month, I like to point to the achievements of women. Not extraordinary women. Ordinary women who have achieved extraordinary things Zhang's company Soho China is transforming whole areas of the Chinese capital. through persistence and vision. I believe most of us are capable of achieving extraordinary things if we just keep working towards our goals and knowing that they are possible. Stories like this one help us know our goals are possible.

Zhang Xin: Building Beijing – CNN.com.Zhang Xin is a billionaire property magnate, has been named one of the world’s most powerful women and has played a large role in transforming Beijing’s architectural landscape.

Zhang’s company Soho China is transforming whole areas of the Chinese capital.

At 45, Zhang has made a name for herself bringing hip, urban architecture to Beijing’s previously gray and drab skyline, and making a lot of money while at it.

She co-founded her property development company Soho China — which stands for Small Office, Home Office — with her husband Pan Shiyi in 1995. When it went public in 2007, it had raised $1.9 billion.

Wealthy, stylish and dynamic, Zhang and Pan are the embodiment of middle-class Chinese aspirations of wealth and success.

However Zhang’s own path to success includes an itinerant childhood and working in a Hong Kong sweatshop when she was only 14 years old.

Zhang’s parents came from a long line of Chinese immigrants who lived in Burma but moved back to Beijing, taking jobs in the Bureau of Foreign Languages. They later separated when Zhang was only 5 years old. Zhang and her mother relocated regularly until they finally settled in Hong Kong. Zhang, then aged 14, worked in a garment factory, while learning English at a secretarial college.

She managed to get a scholarship to study economics at the University of Sussex in England and went on to gain a masters degree from Cambridge. Head-hunters from an investment bank offered her a job on Wall Street where Zhang worked until 1994, when the lure of being part of China’s rapid transformation and economic boom became too great.

She returned to Beijing where she met Pan and joined Vanatone in 1995, the property company he co-founded. The pair set up their own company that became Soho China and have since embarked on a number of projects — One of their first was a boutique hotel by the Great Wall of China.

Since then, Zhang has fostered her passion for architecture and design and invited a number of internationally renowned architects and artists to work with them, including Riken Yamamoto, Patrick Schumacher and Ai Weiwei.

Soho China’s Jianwai project in Beijing’s Chaoyang district is set to be completed in 2011, but already the mix of business and residential towers has transformed a previously run-down and depressed area in the east of the city into one of its most appealing areas for young aspiring professionals.

Last year, Forbes listed Zhang as #19 on their list of the 400 richest Chinese, with a net worth of $1.21 billion. Even in the current tough economic climate, Zhang and Soho China have a bright outlook for 2009 and beyond.

In February, Soho China made a statement saying that more projects would be completed in 2009 than in 2008 and that profits would quadruple to 2.3 billion Yuan.

The Delegation Or Outsourcing Imperative

: Image via Wikipedia

I’ve written before on the critical importance of delegating or outsourcing to give you time to focus on the big picture and develop the right strategic direction so your business can grow.

It’s not easy. Some people have an extraordinarily difficult time doing it. I have a friend who’s a very successful but rather harried and definitely overworked leader of a national organization. She often says: “I can do it myself in the time it takes to show someone else how to do it.” I respond: “Yes. When I teach someone how to do something it takes about as much time as it would take for me to do it myself. Maybe a bit longer. But that person is now able to do it forever.” Do the math. It’s an investment of time that will bring you a great return on your investment.

To succeed, without working yourself to death, we all must learn to delegate or outsource. Finding and training people to delegate or outsource to will give you a support system which will facilitate your success:

First – decide what to delegate: the point of delegating is to free yourself, first, from routine, low level or mechanical tasks which someone else can do, perhaps better and more efficiently than you.

Delegate anything low priority or which doesn’t require your personal attention to achieve your primary goals.

Select the most capable person for the task: you may not like to file, but there’s someone, somewhere, who does. Let them do it.

Give clear direction and reach an agreement on expected results: You should be willing to take the time, up front, to review your expectations and reach an agreement on what the end result should be. Communication is a key component of this process.

Be available for questions and mid course decisions

Set a clear deadline with accomplishment milestones along the way

Finally, give credit to your assistant, volunteer or support staff

The only way to develop a support system for yourself is to let the people you delegate to have the responsibility to do what you’ve asked of them; let them do it their own way; let them make their own mistakes and learn from them. Praise them when they complete their assignment. Point out that the completed task contributes to the success of the company as a whole. Give them credit within the company.

Here’s an example from Chaitanya Sagar on how learning to delegate: ,Delegate or Outsource – If You Want Your Business To Grow

“…In the initial days of my company, I did everything myself. I spoke to customers; I interacted with investors; and wrote business plans. At the same time, I cleaned my office and went long distances just to deliver legal documents somewhere. I spent a lot of time on those tasks which were not strategic or something that contributed to my customers. I did everything because I had nothing better to do. If I hired someone else, I would pay them and I’d have to sit idle!

As a small business grows, and as the scale at which a task is done increases, you have to find ways to get the time to focus on the bigger picture. If you don’t, you will get caught up in myriad routine activities, and can’t progress on strategic areas of your business. You have to make time to steer your business in the right direction. And you can do that by delegating work to others, by outsourcing, and at times, it’s as simple as asking the other party to visit your office instead of you visiting them!

My startup has been growing gradually. And some of the rules I had learned in the initial days are obsolete already. Though I saved precious dollars in the initial days doing all the routine work, time and again, I found myself asking myself, “Why am I doing this? How does my customer benefit from it? Should I not be working on something that enhances value to my customer?”

So now I do what is strategic and outsource many activities like coding for my website, marketing material work, accounting, graphic design, etc. In areas I do outsource, I am glad I do because it led to a lot of progress. Inn hindsight, the decision to outsource my work to others has greatly paid off in the following ways:

1. Where it was not my core competency, I rode on other’s competency and made wonderful progress.

2. When the project (such as product development) was over, I had the ability to scale down the activity reducing the “burn rate” without having to fire employees (had I hired them).

3. I was able to save time and could focus on the strategic aspects of the business.”

What about you? Do you have any delegating or outsourcing examples or experiences to share? We would like to hear from you.

Evolution Of A Website – Birth Of A Business

Some time back, I wrote about Business On The Net: The Morphing Imperative and that set me to thinking about my own morphing on the Net . There is a saying “you make the path by walking on it.” Perhaps on the Net, you make the path by morphing on it. And I have certainly done that. For those of you who are interested, this is my story, so far, on the Net:

The Gold Rush To The Net

It was in December of 1994, that Netscape introduced the browser and the Net opened up the rush beyond the engineers, scientists and government workers who were on the Net before. Now the pioneers who saw the possibilities came, the entrepreneurs and techies and just plain people in remote places who longed for communication with the rest of the world.

At the same time, in December of 1994, my inspiration for a website was a study I was asked to do for the University of Texas at San Antonio business department. They had a lot of very rough, raw material ( like clippings or tear outs from newspapers) which suggested men make more money than women, even when women own their own business. The term “glass ceiling” had only recently become part of America’s vocabulary, when The Wall Street Journal’s “Corporate Woman” column identified “a puzzling new phenomenon. There seemed to be an invisible—but impenetrable—barrier between women and the executive suite, preventing them from reaching the highest levels of the business world regardless of their accomplishments and merits.”The Federal government’s Report on the Glass Ceiling Initiative in 1991 was still somewhat virgin territory for the public at large. It certainly came as somewhat of a shock to me. I thought, Wow, this is pretty interesting stuff, I bet more people would like to know about it.

I spent 1995 learning more about the Glass Ceiling and the Net, as the two converged in my mind as an interesting topic and a new technology platform to present it. I had to learn HTML coding, as in those early days there was no “What you see is what you get ” software, much less content management systems. It was challenging for many reasons and on many levels ( see Match Your Entrepreneur Story about one of the early Internet conferences in 1995 where I was one of 5 women and about 5,000 men). When AdvancingWomen.com finally launched, we got about a million and a half page views in a month, melting down our server 3 times. ( But that’s another story). Remember, back then, the Net was relatively small with little competition. There were no large corporations. No Hearst, no iVillage, although I later worked with both of them.

So, I got in on the ground floor with my niche, the first women’s website to focus on leveling the playing field for women, although we’ve continued to evolve and, as we’ve increased our offerings on business and technology we’ve also increased our male audience. Our concept morphed as well. In the vein of “it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness”, we decided, years ago, it was more effective to give both women and men the tools and strategies to succeed with pocket book and voting booth issues, the pivotal levers, than to keep noting the gap between genders. Consequently, as well as connecting with professional women and business owners, we are one of the leading websites among business men in China and Saudi Arabia, and business and technology experts in the U.S. and globally .We have built a diverse community of both women and businessmen on the web. And we have moved on to produce other websites and other business models. But, back to the beginning:

First Revenue – From Advertising

The first revenue I remember having came from Doubleclick, which invented the targeted ad system. DoubleClick was founded in 1996. My site, AdvancingWomen.com was selected for the initial women’s demographic and I went to their opening launch party in New York. It was a heady, champagne toasting moment. I learned a lot about targeting my demographics and managing my website from DoubleClick until we went our separate ways. For one thing, despite the hype and the potential which always seemed just out of reach, I never really made that much revenue from DoubleClick. So , trading glamour and glory for actual revenue, I struck out on my own. In the beginning, without large competitive corporate websites, I would typically make $5,000 per month from each large corporation which wanted to advertise site wide with AdvancingWomen.com. This was when web sites were rising like hot air balloons.

About that time I was courted by a New York Stock Exchange company, led by a rather ideosyncratic mogul, who wanted to create a web portal by pulling together about a dozen sites in different niches. He boasted he could beat Yahoo, the giant du jour, because they were doing everything wrong. AdvancingWomen.com was selected as the women’s niche and it looked like we were headed for a very big pay day, while getting all the money we would ever need to operate and maintaining a lot of control on top of it. For a moment or two it appeared Utopia was on the horizon.

Or, as the Cole Porter song goes, was it merely Asbury Park? Despite the mogul’s billions that vision evaporated in the dot com crash, as did the money I was making from syndicating AdvancingWomen’s content. Remember Isyndicate? One month I was at a huge, plush and glamorous ISyndiate bash in Hollywood, mingling with tech celebs, sipping champagne and sorting through the lavish giveaways. A month or so later they were toast. ( There’s a lesson in there someplace about applying the bootstrapping wisdom of using ingenuity and elbow grease instead of cash. Fortunately, I have always been into using elbow grease instead of cash so I survived, with the sure knowledge that we were still in the very beginning of the infancy of the Internet. DoubleClick also survived the dot com crash, perhaps because of its market leading technology and constant adaptation to ever changing market conditions. It was formally acquired by Google in March 2008. )

The next big uptick came from the advent of Google adsense.

I can’t begin to tell you how many things I’ve tested. I’ve tested travel, which I thought might be convenient for business customers: zero. I’ve tested business ebooks: nothing ( although this could be the time for that tide to turn with the Kindle and ebooks apps on mobile devices). I’ve tested many, many products, all of which came to nada, nothing. Even in the two core revenue producers on the AdvancingWomen.com site, advertising and employment recruiting, I’ve been through a dozen morphing and transfiguration experiments, starting with Doubleclick Ads, from the day they were born, to some new European ad company that sweet talked me into believing they were going to take the Net by storm, but all they did was produce truly anemic revenues and give me one more learning experience. All this was before I morphed my way into a successful combination of Google ads and ads sold from my site. I also made a decision to increasingly lessen dependence on ad revenue because of its extreme volatility. As hard as it may be to believe, I’ve had 2000% swings in ad revenue. And that was not ok with me, even on the high side. I’m a risk taker not a kamikaze pilot. I needed to put a little dramamine into my site to calm the effects of the choppy waters in advertising.

One product which helped me do that was a Job Board or the employment recruiting facet of our site at Careers.AdvancingWomen.com. From day one, recognizing job boards were an “evergreen” in the business, not subject to the cardiac arrest of a fad, I determined to have a job board. I was a part of every one of what seemed like a half dozen permutations of what eventually became CareerBuilder.com. That was ok for pocket change. What I began to realize was that big job boards who wanted you as an affiliate wanted the demographic you had captured but in no way wanted to promote your site. Why should they, as they would be creating their own competition? Basically they were getting the benefit of your traffic and assuring that you didn’t compete with them or join another competing job board like Monster.com. It worked pretty well for them, but not necessarily so well for you. Ultimately, I was able to start Careers.AdvancingWomen.com , our own job board which guaranteed a.) I would be building my own brand and therefore an asset I could invest in and b.) I would not be giving up 50% of the revenue up front.

It just took a lot of testing to arrive at a successful combination of revenue streams to support the business.

Time To Ramp Up and Scale Up: Next Step – GGwebGroup

Less than a year after I started I began helping other sites set up and ramp up on the Net.

Today I operate AdvancingWomen.com, Careers.AdvancingWomen.com, AW Career & Biz Blog, Advancing Women in Leadership Journal,
NewEnergyResearch.net, the first of several planned “green business” websites, and a number of diverse websites for clients.

I have recently formalized what I have been doing for some time now: consulting about, creating and overseeing websites for clients, particularly from a web business perspective.

Tina Forsyth crystalized this concept in her book, Becoming an Online Business Manager.

Tina describes a situation in which business owners “already have teams of virtual assistants, webmasters, designers and other contractors, but what they really need is someone to manage all of this; to play a bigger role in their business so that they can grow to the next level.”
Now, as online businesses have grown and increased in complexity, with more sophisticated online tools available, Tina says she is “seeing more business owners who are ready to hire at the management level.”

When I started reading Tina’s writing, it was with a mild shock of recognition I realized I had been doing what she described for a number of clients for some time. Since I had operated a major website since 1996, I had ample experience on the web, so a number of businesses and organizations I had come into the same orbit with had asked for me to help them set up shop online. What happened, in every case, was that I was not just setting up or overseeing the set up of a website and collaborative and marketing tools, but helping them think through the business processes they would need to succeed and grow their businesses. It was a collaboration where I implemented their vision, more like a doctor collaborating with a patient, to diagnose the state of his or her health, determine the level he or she really aspired to reach, then prescribing a regimen for increased fitness to ultimately reach that goal. The actual construction of the website was more like being the pharmacist dispensing the medicine. But, in every case, we’ve worked together to reach the right diagnosis, and we’ve constructed websites which support clients in reaching their goals. Often I not only implement them, I continue to oversee them, so clients can focus on building their business or organization. As we’ve formalized this process we’ve given it it’s own website GGwebGroup and also formalized a team with differing specialties so we can help businesses not only focus, but ramp up fast to seize opportunities.

This is where we are today but the Net continues to morph and I’m sure we will too so………to be continued. Sometime in the future.

Seth Godin’s 7 Tips for Startups in a Down Market

You know, I’m always looking for ways to do business better, faster and leaner. Well, I guess what all of that boils down to is doing business smarter. And two of the smartest people out there dishing out smart advice about doing business are Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin. For this interview I have to thank Andrew Warner Internet entrepreneur and founder of Mixergy. He interviews successful people to learn how they did it. Here’s his take from Seth Godin’s 7 Tips for Startups in a Down Market.

“Seth Godin, Squidoo’s founder, is the best-selling author of 10 books that have helped companies build remarkable products and promote them. He’s never written a book about how to grow in a down market, so I called him up and interviewed him about it for Mashable.

Here’s what he said:

1. Recognize that you’ll have less competition

You should know that this is the best thing that ever happened to you because it makes it easier to be the winner when so many people are dropping out.

The dip is closer and shallower then it would be if these were the boom times.

2. Focus on building value

The emphasis should not be on “how do I raise money and hire people.” The emphasis should be on “how do I build value today.”

Because, every day you’re doing this, you’re building value, connecting with people who find you irreplaceable, then you will become irreplaceable.

3. Expect your costs to go down

Understand that in a down economy, not only is there less money for people to spend on you, but you have to spend less money to make stuff that’s worthwhile.

4. Don’t hire like it’s 1999

It makes me sick to see organizations that race out to hire 50 people, because they think that get big fast matters. And then “it’s not their fault” when they lay off 20.

Well sure it is. It’s totally your fault Mr. entrepreneur, because you shouldn’t have hired 50 people to start with.

5. Focus on the irreplaceable

The goal is NOT how fast can you hire as many people as you can. The goal is how irreplaceable are your people. How much can you boil down the essence of what you’re building?

6. Get lean to beat the behemoths

When we look at the home runs online. They are not the Daily Beast with $18 million and hundreds and hundreds of people. They’re Twitter, with a tiny team of people who have a very fine focused, vision.

7. Be disciplined about what you’re building

One of the things the guys at 37signals say is, if you want to be on budget and on time, what you have to do is, the day you hit the budget, or the day you hit the deadline, you have to ship. And it’s a race.

So that’s how you do it. You don’t say how do I get more money to match the spec? You say, how can I get the spec out there for the money I have?

- HOW TO: Raise Money in a Down Economy
- Startup Hacks: An Early Stage Checklist
- Startup Hacks: Seven Ideas for Building Your Team
- Startup Hacks: 7 Questions VCs Will Ask You, What They Really Mean and How You Can Answer Them

Find Online Bargains To Launch Your Business Identity

I’m always on the lookout for ways to run my business more cost effectively, particularly when it involves using online tools since that also collapses the time it takes to accomplish your tasks.

Michelle Madhok of www.Shefinds.com, writing in Ladies Who Launch,has identified a few cost savers. These are particularly useful when you’re trying to launch a business and need some reasonably priced collateral materials:

“1. Don’t pay someone else’s rent. I live in Manhattan where real estate is extremely pricey so when I need a printer I don’t want to pay for the copier’s Manhattan address. Search google.com for the service you need. Color copies at the neighborhood copy shop cost .89 cents each. A quick search finds www.colorcopysite.com in California that will produce the copies for .10 cents each and ship for next day delivery.

2. Cyberscale. Use online businesses where the sole focus is on what you need. For business collateral go virtual. Vistaprint.com is a bargain, offering 250 business cards for $19.99 and 250 postcards for $49.99. Need 200 photos for your press kit? Bonusprint.com charges just 29 cents for a 5×7 print of your digital photo. Compare that to $1 per photo at your local developer.

3. Fair trade. Many people looking to make a career change or get experience in your industry may be willing to trade their expertise for yours. Visit sites such as ryze.com and craigslist.com where you can post a message about the services you need. Personally I found people to help me with marketing, analysis, copy editing and photography all in exchange for my experience or advice.”

Here is The Best Twitter Marketing Service Ever (lucafiligheddu.com)

Making Money From Activism on the Web

: Image by emdot via Flickr

The Obama Model Web 2.0 – Social activism, bordering on a movement, is a whole new concept. Well, maybe it’s a rebirth and reconfiguration of a Web.1 concept. (According to Humanity.org, these are the top 10 Social Activist Sites: The World Revolution, Ashoka, Changemakers, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Earth Fund, Afribike, Grupa hajdeda da…, The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), and Youth Against Aids (YAA) ). But it does use a whole new set of social media tools that did not exist until recently.

Or maybe it’s another transformation of an even older concept, corporate social responsibility or CSR. Two prime examples are ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s, which not only promotes support sustainable and safe and environmentally friendly methods of food production but seeks and supports nonviolent ways to achieve peace and justice as well. Another vendor, Whole Foods Markets, goes to the ends of the earth, literally, to find delicious and unusual products. Whole Foods then partners with local farmers and producers, even including direct micro-credit loans to their vendors, in order to bring quality to their customers, and, at the same time, lift up emerging economies. It has been a powerful formula.

But now there is a new model on the web, inspired by the Obama’s extremely media savvy campaign. It is a model where activism is not rooted in a bricks and mortar organization but driven, primarily, by viral marketing on the web and the formation of a communities of interest. Or are they movements?

Whatever you call them, you can use the same model.

As set by Tim Leberecht in Obama Inc. – Web activism for profit:

“A recent example of this kind of Obama Inc. start-up, San Francisco-based firm Virgance, was featured in the Economist this week, and the article indicates that social impact in an activism 2.0 world is shifting from a welcome side benefit to an integral component in the business models of Internet entrepreneurs. The new kids on the web have internalized the lessons from the Obama campaign, and now they want to make a difference, too – and money. The Economist describes Virgance’s model as “for-profit-activism.” Named after a plot device in Star Wars, the company aims to support social causes through a multi-pronged campaign platform that resembles the way Obama for America mobilized its supporters, and it typically consists of four core elements:

1. A web-empowered volunteer network

2. A presence on Facebook

3. A team of paid bloggers to promote the campaigns

4. YouTube viral videos

Among the first Virgance-supported campaigns are 1BOG (“one block off the grid” – aiming to convince homeowners to switch to solar energy), Carrotmobs (public contests that incentivize retailers to become green), and Lend Me Some Sugar (based on the Facebook application that gives users virtual sugar cubes for donations to a cause of their choice).

Virgance is not the first for-profit-do-gooder of course; there have been plenty of others whose business model combines bottom line thinking with social value: the Economist, for example, puts Virgance in a line with Project RED. But Virgance is more like Facebook Causes. It adopts the forces of “Here Comes Everybody” and builds its entire business on a social web platform, embracing the principles of open-source, mass collaboration, and transparency: “If a for-profit company did the type of work that non-profits often do, but did it more efficiently, would people trust it the same way they trust non-profits?” the Virgance web site describes the company’s ambitious mission. ”What if everything the company did was completely transparent? What if it was open source? If we can create this kind of company, and succeed, how many other companies would follow our example? Along the way, could we change the face of the business world itself?”

Does that language sound familiar? The Obamapreneurs are adept at turning their campaigns into movements. Clearly, the Obamanization of business – both in terms of substance and style – has arrived in reality, and we will see more Obama Inc.’s in 2009.

On February 27-28, IESE Business School will gather entrepreneurs, scientists, foundations, and corporations at its annual student-run Doing Good and Doing Well conference in Barcelona. It’ll be interesting to see how the Obama gem will make its way into the more old-school world of CSR (corporate social responsibility).”

If you have set up something like this or thought about it or want to or know someone who has…. write us. Share. We can all master this with the help of each other.

Linked In Is For Entrepreneurs As Well

: Image via CrunchBase

Scott Allen runs a blog on entrepreneurs at About.com . I always find he has something valuable to say or an interesting and enlightening store to tell about entrepreneurs. In this instance, Scott has some thoughts on LinkedIn. Scott is a self described “huge advocate of social networking and social media for entrepreneurs”, so he should know a thing or two about that subject.

Many people describe LinkedIn as the defacto resume on the Net for job seekers, which I think it probably is for higher level job seekers. Others describe it has the way to raise your profile in the corporate world, enhance your credibility, build your and put yourself out there should other opportunities come looking for you. But Scott has a slightly different take. In Why Entrepreneurs Should Use LinkedIn, Scot says:

“Among the hundreds of people I’ve worked with on how to use LinkedIn more effectively, I’ve found that the most common problem people have with understanding how to use LinkedIn effectively is when they try to use it like other social networking sites, or try to use it like a contact management system or other tool they’re familiar with. While it has similarities to these other tools, LinkedIn is unique in the value it provides.

I could write a book on the many different ways you can use LinkedIn to grow and enhance your business (for a sampling, see 100+ Smart Ways to Use LinkedIn). But for now, I want to answer the question, “What, fundamentally, is the unique capability of LinkedIn?” What makes it different from your contact management software? Or from other social networking sites?

Its users have adapted LinkedIn for all kinds of uses, but fundamentally, LinkedIn addresses three basic issues significantly differently than other solutions:

People search. Web search engines are lousy at searching for people. Sure, there are automated biography tools like ZoomInfo which are useful, but they have challenges with people like me who have a common name, and there’s often a lot of “noise” there compared to “signal” – not nearly as concise and organized as a properly done LinkedIn profile. And in your own contact database, you only have the limited amount of data obtained (and recorded) through your interaction with them. Sure, if I know your e-mail address, I can contact you. But what most people can’t do with their contact database is answer a question like: “Who do I know who used to work for one of the big accounting firms?” Or maybe: “Do any of my friends have a background in musical theater that maybe I don’t know about?” No matter how well you think you know people, you don’t know them as well as they know themselves. I don’t know of any other solution that does this as well as LinkedIn.
Keeping in touch. People change jobs these days like some people change clothes, and it becomes hard to keep track of people who are genuinely friends or business associates, but that you’re not in contact with on a regular basis. Every time you change jobs or e-mail addresses, do you contact every single person you know and tell them? And even if you do, do you think they all update it in their contact database? Once you’re connected on LinkedIn, you no longer have to keep track of that data – the person whose data it is now keeps it up-to-date, and you’ll always know how to reach them. For the millions of LinkedIn users, that’s also a huge collective savings in data maintenance. Rather than trying to keep track of several hundred people’s contact information, current employer, etc., now they all keep it up-to-date for you, and all you have to keep up-to-date is your own information.
Your extended network. LinkedIn’s core value proposition is simply this: the ability to answer the question, “Who do I know who knows and can recommend somebody that.” .works at XYZ company? .is an expert in widgets? .is a good lawyer specializing in whatever my problem is? Without LinkedIn, how do you do this? You either a) pick the most likely people in your network to know that kind of person, but you may still miss them because so often those connections aren’t necessarily obvious; or b) you contact everybody you know, which starts wearing thin if you do it a lot, since 99% of the people you ask won’t be able to help. LinkedIn makes it so that you only ask the people who are likely to be able to help. It’s like being able to search not only your own contact database, but those of your friends, and their friends, and then ask for the introduction when you find the right person.I hope that helps, and I’m happy to answer any further questions anyone may have about LinkedIn.”

Scott mentions some of the other ways you can use LinkedIn… and there are many, ” but if you want to truly understand what makes LinkedIn uniquely powerful, focus on the three core capabilities above.”

And we entrereneurs need to be using these tools as much or more than those with steady….. or maybe not so steady now….. nine to five jobs.

Related on About:

To Entrepreneur, Consider What Processes You Are Really Good At?

Seth Godin, marketer extroidinaire and internet guru makes the case that, when trying to figure out the direction you need to go in your work life, you need to look at two things: content/domain knowledge and process. He explains that “process refers to the emotional intelligence skills you have about managing projects, visualizing success, persuading other people of your point of view, dealing with multiple priorities etc.”

I have to admit, when I started entrepreneuring I had neither. My father died and I was suddenly thrust into managing ranchland, mineral rights, cattle, grazing, tough as leather cowhands, and swarms of immigrants crossing over and across our land which was like the Camino Real into the States, as old as the ancient Indian trails crisscrossing the Southwest. It was a bit disconcerting to a young woman who had just come back from the East, from Wellesley with its crew neck sweaters and circle pins, having graduated from Columbia, that egg-head paradise, a stone’s throw from the Broadway theaters, which I frequented regularly. Yet, here I was in the South Texas sun and red dust or mud, depending on the season, wearing boots for fear of rattlesnakes and carrying firearms for fear of all else, trying to run a busines But what’s a gal to do? I learned.

What I did have when I started was the fearlessness of someone trained since birth to be an entrepreneur and considering risk taking as natural as breathing. So even though I might have been put off by rattlesnakes, I assumed I could learn a business, any business, just as well as anyone else, because my father had convinced me I could. And I did.

But I have to agree with Seth. Perhaps the most important things I learned were high level things that I didn’t even realize at the time involved process, perhaps because my father didn’t call it that. What he had were certain maxims that I had to learn to decode. Statements like ” You have to be around money to make money.” Or, go into a lucrative market, not one that’s hanging on by its fingernails. Or, my favorite. At the age of 5 or so, my father would point to a building and ask “What’s that building worth?” The correct answer was, “As much as you can get for it.”

Those are the kind of processes that are invaluable and here’s Seth’s take on it from Seth’s Blog: What are you good at?.

“As you consider marketing yourself for your next gig, consider the difference between process and content.

Content is domain knowledge. People you know or skills you’ve developed. Playing the piano or writing copy about furniture sales. A rolodex of movers in a given industry, or your ability to compute stress ratios in your head.

Domain knowledge is important, but it’s (often) easily learnable.

Process, on the other hand, refers to the emotional intelligence skills you have about managing projects, visualizing success, persuading other people of your point of view, dealing with multiple priorities, etc. This stuff is insanely valuable and hard to learn. Unfortunately, it’s usually overlooked by headhunters and HR folks, partly because it’s hard to accredit or check off in a database.

Venture capitalists like hiring second or third time entrepreneurs because they understand process, not because they can do a spreadsheet.

As the world changes ever faster, as industries shrink and others grow, process ability is priceless. Figure out which sort of process you’re world-class at and get even better at it. Then, learn the domain… that’s what the internet is for.

One of the reasons that super-talented people become entrepreneurs is that they can put their process expertise to work in a world that often undervalues it.

Learn How To Differentiate Brand “You”

We all have a brand. Some of us just may not know it. And that’s not a good thing. How are you going to shape and control your brand if you’re not even aware of it? Or put some energy and focus into getting it right?

You know the answer to that.

You’re not. And you should. We all should.

And to achieve successful branding we need to be able to differentiate our brand from all the other brands out there.

Why do you think you never see Christianne Amanpour interviewing a group of, say, automakers, from Detroit? Because that’s not her brand. She’s created a name for herself in exploring and analyzing the issues behind international hot spots like the Middle East. Or you might see her donning a burka to covertly explore tormented and male dominated society in Afghanistan.

Why do you think Martha Stewart‘s version of The Apprentice took a nose dive? Because Martha Stewart is not usually thought of in a board room making decisions. She’s thought of baking the best and most beautiful cherry pies. Or picking a soft, signature color for a living room. That’s why her association with KB Homes works. Because people can see Martha and her expertise in that setting. Martha Stewart may be a mogul, but people don’t perceive her that way. Because that’s not her brand.

To examine branding a little more closely let’s take a look at food conglomerate Kraft Foods which sells hundreds of different food items in 155 countries. Everything from A1 Steak sauce to Jello, Planters Peanuts, Velveeta and Wheat Thins.

Ok. A little further down that food chain, General Foods International is a subdivision of Kraft Foods and it produces several different flavors of instant coffee, everything from Cafe Vienna, Dark Mayan Chocolate, Hazlenut Belgian, Orange Cappuccino and Pumpkin Spice to Viennese Chocolate Cafe. Not much chance of mistaking Dark Mayan Chocolate with Pumpkin Spice, right?

And it should be the same with each of us. Our potential audience, customers or clientele should know instantly whether we are Dark Mayan Chocolate or Pumpkin Spice, metaphorically speaking.

For instance, I operate a number of websites, one of which is called AdvancingWomen.com. It deals with with career and financial parity for women by electronically mentoring them so they have the tools and training to get better jobs or start their own businesses. Occasionally we mention women running for political office, because, research shows, women legislators will pass laws more supportive of women. Fighting for equal pay would be one example. No one on the web confuses AdvancingWomen.com with a dating site. No one goes there for gossip or make-up tips. We are what we are. And people know what we are. We may have a small slice of a large pie, but we do have a slice. We don’t aim to gobble up the whole pie and lose even our slice in the food fight that follows. As Esther Dyson, venture capitalist and digital guru said, “More companies die from indigestion than starvation.” In other words, they take on too much and flame out or stumble down trying to handle it all.

So the bottom line is: Look deep inside yourself and decide who you are. Narrow your focus. Concentrate on that. That will be “Brand You”. Broadcast that and you will succeed.

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