Blasted

I was interviewed by a writer from the Star Tribune today about the value of LinkedIn. It really got me thinking about the service and why I have stuck with it, and why i hope those who have been recently laid off get re-hired.

I have been a major LinkedIn networker since 2004. The CTO of R/GA John Mayo-Smith invited me in when Target was in the midst of selling off Mervyns and Marshall Fields.

We had zeroed in on R/GA as a strategic interactive partner for the future transformation of Target.com. Bob Greenberg, the R and G of R/GA is a mad genius the like I hadn’t come across until I met John Olson. R/GA was where Kyle Cooper had started prior to moving on to Imaginary Forces and Prologue Films. I know this is an interesting side note, but another has to do with the movie Minority Report, you’ll have to ask me personally about that one though. Bob was also a collector of outsider art, my favorites being several Henry Darger pieces that hung on the walls of their Manhattan offices. Of course I was blown away by this since I had last seen the Darger work at the Contemporary in Chicago. It was an interesting project to say the least.

But I digress, LinkedIn.

I was hesitant at first since I had seen sixdegrees disappear, Friendster flounder and be replaced by MySpace, which in turn has been superceded by Facebook etc… but LinkedIn has thrived, despite the recent layoff news, against all of this competition, and other folks, Plaxo (the virus), Spock (the spy) and a host of other competitors.

I have used LinkedIn to connect people, to find employees, to find work, and to make connections that would never have been possible without the tool. I have a budding business partnership growing because we had so many interconnections on LinkedIn we decided we must get together to meet each other. I have twice as many folks on my LinkedIn network as I have on Facebook, it allows me to connect to every major company in the U.S. and the world.

LinkedIn has become an important part of my professional life, and I contend that it is one of the most successful social networking sites online today and will continue to be so.

Posted by matt in Your Business Universe, Your Partners, Your Teams, Your Vision | No Comments

Facebook, Joyent and Sun have partnered to provide free scalable, on-demand infrastructure from Joyent to Facebook developers. Joyent’s Accelerator on-demand infrastructure provides the very best load balancers, routing and switching fabric, x86 servers and storage from Sun. Facebook developers can take advantage of Joyent Accelerators to quickly launch Facebook applications capable of scaling to millions of users. All for free. http://www.joyent.com/developers/facebook

I think this is an incredible opportunity for any developer out there who wants to dip their toe into what I believe to be one of the most exciting developments in technology right now. Joyent is a cloud computing company that has opened its services for free allowing you to kill two robotic birds with one innovative stone, social and cloud computing.

Posted by matt in Your Strategies, Your Vision | No Comments

The advertising challenge of today is how does a marketer cut through all of the media clutter and noise to get to your targeted demo, where are they? They could be hanging out with Oprah at oprah.com, watching and uploading videos at Youtube, shooting net friends in an online game, or they could be living, breathing, collaborating, creating the next generation of media through mash-ups and remixing, or creating and categorizing their own content by blogging and tagging.

Its interesting now that the promises made in the 90’s are finally coming to pass. With service based architectures the dream of publishing once, view anywhere, is quickly coming to fruition. As the new standards shake out you have to be there, on the forefront, innovating. It is time for you to learn about the power of the semantic web and its impact on media type specific content creation and delivery.

How will marketers and advertisers get close to a clients customers? By living with them online, getting close to them, offer them ways to alter content, ways to interact with the messaging, create their own messaging, be the brand champions to influence others. This was the promise we were dreaming about in the 90s. It is here.

Look for posts coming up soon on:

• Communities and the social web.
• Folksonomies and tagging.
• The democratization of news.
• Remixing and mash-ups
• The digitization of everything.

Posted by matt in Your Delivery, Your Strategies, Your Vision | No Comments