Marketing Nirvana

Summary: Attended the packed keynote address at good friend Dave McClure’s “Graphing Social Patterns” – Blog conversations around Reid Hoffman’s keynote, initiated by Dan Farber’s blog post — Reid’s interview w/ Teresa Valdez Klein at Web Community Forum

From earlier today: First thing this morning, I headed over to the Holiday Inn, San Jose, to attend the first “Graphing Social Patterns” conference hosted by Dave McClure (next year this event will be hosted under the O’Reilly umbrella). I did write an extensive overview of they keynote presentation itself on LinkedIn’s corporate blog. TechMeme chronicles the various blog conversations streaming in on the coverage. Feel free to check it out here.

Picture Source: Eddie Codel’s Flickr Library

Dan Farber whose blog post initiated the blog conversation writes:

Hoffman, who is also an investor in Facebook, explained how Facebook and Linkedin offer different use cases. Linkedin is about affecting business and has more context than Facebook around that use, he said. Linkedin, for example, recently introduced photos to its site (head shots of members), but not photo sharing. Similarly, Linkedin Answers is more tied to professional reputation and providing expertise compared to the more general Facebook answer applications.

I’m an eager user of LinkedIn Answers and most of my questions on LI are great ways for me to augment my blog coverage of topics related to marketing, basically ideas that I share on my blog here; LI Answers is a great way to gather ideas from the wisdom of my professional crowd, esp. those who do not subscribe to my blog. For e.g. Just recently, I asked a question on Facebook on politics and got 0 answers compared to the roughly 10 to (most recently) 50 answers that I normally receive on LinkedIn on business related topics. Next time, I’ll ask the same question on both networks and will let you know what happens. However, I think the main reason for that is because my social network probably isn’t too concerned about my interests in politics? (Disclosure: In case you’re not aware, I’m the Community Evangelist at LinkedIn)

Also, another friend of mine and fellow blogger Teresa Valdez Klein (Web Community Forum) interviewed Reid after the keynote with questions on several key issues concerning web communities, LinkedIn, Microformats and the web 2.0 space in general. Check out Reid’s post-keynote video interview and feel free to leave any questions at the end of this post, on community marketing that you feel I may be able to address. (Teresa, if there’s a YouTube version of the interview, let me know and I can embed the video within the post)

Teresa interviewing Reid post-keynote session (Source: My Flickr feed)

Personally, I believe at LinkedIn we have a set of tools (whether it is LinkedIn Groups or LinkedIn Answers) which allows the creation of professional communities and encourages tapping into the wisdom of that professional crowd that you belong to. Here’s what’s new in LinkedIn Groups. And, here are some popular LinkedIn Answers from the recent past.

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