Building Your Network

I find myself spending more and more time on LinkedIn lately.  Not because I am looking for a job, which is one of main uses of the platform by it’s 50+ million subscribers, but because of a book I recently read, "Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship At A Time."   Although it was written in 2005 when Linkedin was just a glimmer of it’s future self, (and barely registers a mention in any of the chapters) today there is no better tool to act on the book’s powerful message.

The problem with most books in the motivation/self-improvement aisle is they feel great while reading, but rarely have any real long-term impact.  Reading them, I tend to say to myself, “yeah – I do all that already.” Invariably, the book’s core messages “go in one ear and out the other,” as my mother used to say.

"Never Eat Alone” is different.  The book is based on a simple message: our network of friends, family, colleagues, associates, mentors and mentees are the foundation of all our success and happiness in life.  And the more we build and nurture this network through genuine relationship building and mutually beneficial interactions, the more happy and successful we will be.  The author emphasizes that our approach has to be in a spirit of generosity, not "what’s in it for me."

(Although I highly recommend the book, it is a bit marred by celebrity name dropping including an almost deal-breaking, reverential reference to Donald Trump.)

Some of the tactics:

• Look for mentors: Link up with people who can help guide your career and can introduce you to the people you need to know. Then become a mentor yourself.

•  Be interesting: Develop the style, knowledge, and expertise that will draw others to you.

• Build it before you need it: Create lists of people you know—and those you want to know—and maintain ongoing contacts with them throughout your life and career—not just when you need a favor.

•  Never eat alone: Avoid the fate of "invisibility"—use potential social settings to constantly reach out to colleagues and future contacts.

So after zipping through the book last month, I was inspired to find some digital tools to act on the book’s message and better grow and tie my network together.  (As mentioned earlier, the book was written 5 years ago before the explosive growth of social media, leaving current readers on their own to find the best tools and platforms.)

LinkedIn immediately fit the bill.  They have done a great job powering the platform with tools that provide much of the real time immediacy of Facebook.  Status updating, commenting and liking, forming groups and linking to Twitter and blog feeds are now standard features, along with an increasingly intuitive "People You May Know" engine.  

With a little exploring, I found additional features that immediately enabled me to to accomplish my goals.  (All included in the free version.) 

The first thing I did was go through my Outlook address book and invite everyone I was not yet connected to on LinkedIn to connect. More often than not, I replaced the generic LinkedIn message with a more personal one. (For the few people who don’t have an account yet, LinkedIn invites them to join the service.)

It quickly became apparent how irrelevant contact software like Outlook is becoming. With people changing jobs and positions so frequently, their contact information is often out-of-date, and the task of cutting and pasting new updated information seems archaic with so much now stored in the cloud.  And people are quite diligent about keeping their info on LinkedIn current.

Next I used LinkedIn’s tagging tool to categorize all my contacts - Friend, Colleague, City, Type of Business, etc.

Finally, I made sure my personal information was up-to-date and interesting, including new tools to link to this blog and my Twitter feed.

I am sure there is a lot more I can do.  I will keep you posted on my progress.

It was recently reported that LinkedIn is valued at over $2 billion.  Seems justified if they can become the hub for everyone's network.

Thoughts From Someone Who is "Crushing It"

I joined an organization called NY Video last year and attend their Meetups in NYC every couple of months. The organization's founder, Yorin Samis, has done a great job building a community of over 3,000 media entrepreneurs and execs in NY who gather to share information about their online video-based businesses.

Last week's Meetup featured a Q&A session with Gary Vaynerchuk, who took over his Dad's liquor store when in he was in his early 20s and built it into a $60 million business. Along the way, he mastered every new media platform from online video to Facebook to Twitter,  just as they were moving into the mainstream. 

His daily online video show is one of the most viewed original web series of all time and he is approaching one-million followers on Twitter.  Since he became a web video sensation a few years back, he has moved well beyond selling wine and many people now follow him based on his well-informed thoughts on new media tools, branding, and entrepreneurship.

He has a written a best-selling book titled "Crushing It",  launched a marketing agency and has an unabashed plan to buy the NY Jets.  And while most of his success can be tied to new media, he has also mastered traditional media appearing on practically every major media outlet from Conan O'Brien to Jimmy Fallon to ABC News. 

His path from Russian emigrant to wine store owner to media maven and celebrity is inspiring.  He also appears to be a good dude.  More importantly, he is uniquely qualified to riff on the future of media and advertising, which he did in response to some great questions from Yaron and members of the audience last week.

When asked which media tool he would choose if he could only keep one, he was torn between between Twitter and Facebook, before choosing Facebook.  Like many others in the media industry he questions why Twitter, despite its enormous success,  has been unable to catch on with the younger demos.

He said that Facebook and Twitter are currently being used at less than 15% of their potential and the best way to imagine their future is too look at them as utilities, much like the railroads and electric companies at early stages in their history before their enormous impact on society was realized.

He was less enthusiastic about Google's future opining that Facebook could dominate search one day as recommendations from friends become more valuable and relevant than random search results from across the web that are based on monetization strategies and search engine manipulation. 

A clear move in this direction was Facebook's new partnership with Amazon last week.  Amazon.com now offers a personalized Facebook-powered page that offers birthday and gift suggestions as well as specific products that are popular with your friends.  (I signed up immediately and discovered that "The Hangover" and "The Bible" are popular items among my diverse network.)

Social Beat goes so far as to call the partnership Facebook's most important integration to date:

"A deep Amazon.com-Facebook partnership could help corner Google in the e-commerce market. One of Google’s most lucrative use cases is when consumers search to decide which products to buy. Costs-per-click on product keywords like refrigerators, TVs and books are often easily more than $1. But if consumers start looking toward their friends to find out what to buy, they could be able to bypass Google altogether."

So it's obvious Gary has a great feel for the new media landscape.  I always find it valuable to spend time with successful entrepreneurs who are willing to share their stories and opinions.

Moving Towards An App World

Google brought app development to the masses last week with the introduction of a free software tool call App Inventor.  I haven't played around with it yet, but from the reviews it sounds like Google is making it as easy to create an Android smartphone app as it to create a blog using their enormously popular Blogger platform.

And believe me, designing and launching a blog on Blogger is easy, rivaling in technical complexity, say, Microsoft Power Point.  App Inventor even uses the same drag and drop blocks of code featured on Blogger.

The initiative is another example of the free, open source environment Google is enabling in general, and specifically in the smartphone market as it competes head-to-head with Apple and it's more tightly controlled app development approach.

But how many apps do we need?  There are already 225,000 iPhone apps and 65,000 Android apps, with hundreds more being introduced every week.  New York Times tech and media columnist David Pogue challenged his Twitter followers to invent new iPhone and Android apps, featuring the more creative ones in his column last Thursday.  Ironically, the most compelling (and timely) app was not in David's column, but featured in another section on the Times called Gadgetwise.  This app tells you how much sun you should have and saves you from sunburn.

A column in Ad Age last week went as far as to describe the "end of the web as we know it."  The columnist, Steve Rubel, refers to a Morgan Stanley study predicting that within 5 years Internet consumption on mobile devices will surpass the same activity on PCs.

He writes, " mobile devices, by their nature, force users to become more mission-oriented.  As more Internet consumption shifts to gadgets, it's increasingly becoming an app world and we just live in it.
Innovation, fun, simplicity and single-purpose utility will rule while grandiose design and complexity will fall by the wayside."

This seems to make sense.  Last year I downloaded the Pandora app to my iPod Touch and plugged it into my stereo.  This simple app quickly became the central hub for all my family's music consumption.

Just as media companies and advertisers are finally figuring out how to effectively present their content and information on the web, they will need to reinvent again for entirely new consumption patterns.

Shooting From The Hip With Social Media

Big news everywhere we turn this week and last from the world of social media.  Early last week Nielsen reported that 22 percent of all time spent on the Internet is social.  According to a study by the big research company, web users spend one in every four and a half minutes they are online on social networks and blogs.

Some equally compelling data from another research firm, as reported in eMarketer, shows that 50% of Facebook users click on Facebook ads to "like" a brand and 33% of Twitter users share opinions about companies or products.

It seems as social media permeates our lives and  new levels of connectivity are added through mobile devices, entirely new consumer behaviors are developing.

Up until recently it was rare for me to see friends on Facebook mention specific products other than those associated with pop culture such as TV Shows, Movies, Music and Books.   But in the last couple of weeks I have seen friends speak glowingly of experiences with consumer brands that exceeded their expectations in one way or another like Netflix, ZipCar, GroupOn and Trader Joes.

Companies are being forced to react to all this on multiple levels.  Never has the pressure been greater for a business to absolutely delight their customers and tap into an ever growing pool of potential evangelists who will share their experiences on one of their preferred social networks. (Disappointing and frustrating them carries too much downside - witness the AT&T/iPhone debacle last week.)

So at the highest level, companies need to weave social media considerations into their entire operating mentality. And, on a more granular level, they need to be dedicating more and more resources and strategic thinking to intimately managing specific social media platforms and channels.

For most companies this is not proving easy.  According to another piece of research released this week,  as reported in Media Post, more than half of companies say they are using social media with absolutely no strategy.

"... most companies appear to be shooting from the hip, with no cohesive game plan or measurement systems in place. Even among those with a plan, few have written policies and communications protocols in place, leaving the organization exposed to problems arising out of employees communicating in ways that inadvertently hurt -- rather than help -- their company brands."

Shocking, but not surprising in such fast-fracturing media landscape.  Seems companies are barely able to keep up with their traditional and online media executions, and when they do develop a clever social media idea, it comes out of nowhere and doesn't seem to be connected to a broader marketing strategy.

Is Virgin America's offer this week to offer free flights to Twitter influencers "shooting from the hip" or smart marketing?

The Upfront PR Blitz

The TV and Cable industry have some great PR machines behind them.  Based on all the buzz surrounding this year's upfront market, you would think TV advertising is absolutely indispensable and that those marketers who don't commit upfront will be at a significant disadvantage.  Happily, for the networks, the more this sentiment is embraced, the higher the prices.

It is fascinating that in the most electrifying, disruptive media environment in history, where consumers are adapting to new technologies at breathtaking speed (who isn't buying a digital reader, watching TV shows on their computer or using their phones in ways unimaginable just 6 months ago?), the headlines are focused on a 50+ year old ad marketplace.

I think some of the hype is justified.  An Ad Age column this week titled "In Praise of the Original Social Media: Good Ol' Television" points out that most social media chatter is about TV shows.

"It's amazing how often we use new media to talk about what old media is up to. And of all the old media, TV maintains the tightest grip on our collective consciousness. Pay attention to what's really being talked about en masse on Twitter (and Facebook and elsewhere in the social-media sphere) and chances are pretty good it relates to what's on TV at the moment somewhere in the world, or what was on TV last night."

True, to some extent.  But it's really just a few dozen or so shows (and entertainment and sporting events) that are generating all the talk.  Most TV programming is generating very little talk, much less viewing.  The goal of the networks during the upfront is to package the hot with the not, which is going to meet more and more resistance from advertisers in a media landscape with so many other options to reach their customers.

(And there is plenty of "talk" about content unrelated to broadcast and cable television. See below.)

Another columnist, in the same issue of Ad Age, reflected this sentiment and was more cautious in his prediction for this year's upfront.

"If they (the advertisers) can't find the ratings they need in the preferred places, they will look hard to find those ratings somewhere else."

And in many instances, they already are.  Toyota, one of the largest TV advertisers, spent a fair amount on TV to launch their new Sienna Mini Van.  But you would be hard pressed to find anyone that didn't think they got as much value, if not more, from "The Sienna Family." a hilarious collection of web videos that have become a viral sensation.  My personal favorite : "The Swagger Wagon."




There is no doubt that television advertising is essential to support an automotive new model launch, but it should be alarming to network executives that successful campaigns like "The Sienna Family" are being launched with absolutely no connection to the traditional large entertainment and media engines.

Programs like this are a clear reflection of marketers moving key executives into digital and social media roles.

Again, from the Ad Age column:

"The appointment of M.T. Carney as Disney Studio's new head of marketing was not just interesting because of the inspired choice to go with an outsider; it signaled Disney Studios' direction to break away from the traditional advertising (read: TV-driven) model. The studio's chairman, Rich Ross, in announcing Carney's appointment, described her as an exec who "can market a product across multiple platforms and has firsthand knowledge of new media and its effectiveness in reaching consumers."

And one of the marketing community's most visible and quoted execs, Jim Farley at Ford, is quite vocal about his company's decreased reliance on television.

So, another upfront and another round of chatter about why this year it will be different. 

Ads on Manhole Covers and Online Bank Statements

The entrepreneurial energy of the advertising and media industry never ceases to amaze me.  And while successful new ad-supported media businesses are often driven by a clever new content initiative that leverages an emerging technology platform (MTV, Google, Facebook), many times the business has nothing to do with content and is simply based on the age-old principle of the land grab - identify a valuable location, muscle your way in, stake your claim, scale. 

The outdoor advertising industry followed this principle, creating enormous fortunes for entrepreneurs and highly profitable businesses for major media companies such as Clear Channel and CBS, who have consolidated thousands of properties.  These businesses generate most of their revenue from selling ads on signs of every conceivable size in every conceivable location from highways, roof tops and building walls to trains, buses, sporting stadiums, malls and bathrooms.

It seems every day a new "land grab" advertising idea comes to market, testing the appetite of the marketing community to place an ad message into yet another nook and cranny of our lives. (And surprising and exasperating all of us with the idea that there are still places in the physical realm that haven't been claimed.)

The Folgers ad above uses the "Land Grab" metaphor quite literally. 

But it's also the digital realm where entrepreneurs are staking claims, identifying highly trafficked areas that no one previously considered as an environment for advertising.  The latest: online bank statements where ads and promotions are linked to a particular transaction. So, underneath a transaction for a department store might be a discount offer from a rival store. 

According to a recent article in Ad Age, marquee advertisers such as Macy's and McDonald's have signed on for test campaigns, giving the business some initial credibility. 

As long as advertisers continue to be as entrepreneurial and experimental as the creators of these new businesses, the surprises will never stop coming.