Social Media – The Use For The Common Man

So, a whole generation is being raised on the joys and attendant fears of Myspace, Orkut, Facebook and other social networking sites. Metrics of success and failure of emerging technology/ media companies are now very deeply embedded in how well they can cross-link to these sites.

The concept is so simple, yet so effective – For those of you who have read the “Three Investigators” series popular in my youth (where Alfred Hitchcock featured as the expert), it is reminiscent of the “ghost to ghost hook up” that the three friends used as an investigating technique – that, according to me, many years ago, laid down the very backbone of ‘viral’ networking.

However, the one website that really makes the grade in their niche is, according to me, LinkedIn. I was pushed into it, reluctantly so, but in a short time, have come to realize the enormous help this can be to me, and my company.

We have used this across all functions in EmPower Research – by our HR Department for Recruitment (since prospects have come to us via LinkedIn); by our Research Department as a market research tool to get expert opinion on a diverse range of issues; by our BD teams to build sales lists; by a few experts in our industry who wanted to interview us for thought leadership; we even got some unsolicited business via LinkedIn – our first Asia Client!

Their algorithm is powerful, they have cool analytics, they have very good search engine optimization (whenever I type my company’s name (EmPower Research) on Google, I get a few LinkedIn profiles on the first page!), they seem to be fairly secure, they are expanding really fast, and seem to have very widespread adoption….

Did you know that 14 million professionals are LinkedIn? That executives from 498
Fortune 500 companies use the network? That 65,000 new Professionals are added every week? That it generates over 100 million ad impressions per month?
Fantastic, eh? Are you LinkedIn?