James Enck of Daiwa Securities SMBC Europe quotes an institutional investorwho says:

“I find I increasingly get a lot more out of reading blogs than sell-side research. I am doing more and more primary research myself, and blogs form a very important part of that process.”

I agree with Enck’s thesis, but that’s only part of the picture. The general trend is towards greater use of primary unfiltered sources, which is precisely what my company, Nitron Advisors, does.

Quoting from the press release that we used in launching Nitron:

Nitron can provide far more insight than traditional research:

Nitron’s only role is to quickly connect investors with the most appropriate and insightful experts. The firm does not manage money and has no investment banking business. As a result, Nitron’s only incentive is to provide its clients with unbiased insight.

Investors get information direct from the source, rather than getting information through two, three or even four intermediaries all of which can trade ahead of them.

Nitron is far cheaper than alternative sources of research, taking into account the quality of the firm’s experts and the speed with which Nitron provides clients access to the right expert for their needs.

There are three primary drivers behind the growth in demand for expert-matching services:

The first driver of demand is the ever-more-perfect efficiency of the markets. The overwhelming majority of investors underperform the indices. Regulation FD makes management’s proclamations a commodity instantly reflected by the market. Investors need unique, creative, frontline insights to truly differentiate themselves from the vast armies of competitors. Traditional research methods give investors data only after it has passed through 2, 3, or even 4 pairs of hands. Ironically, Nitron is a middleman who helps to cut out the traditional middlemen: the sell-side research analysts, the journalists, the research firms, and so on.

The second driver of demand is the fact that sell-side firms, the traditional producers of research, are heavily conflicted. Recent events have dramatically publicized this problem. The Precursor Group found that 95% of the 82 firms ranked by the Wall Street Journal as the “Best Stock Pickers on the Street”, and 100% of Institutional Investor’s 2000 top investment research firms, have line of business research conflicts. [1] Nitron recently performed a survey of hedge fund managers and found that most professional investors use sell-side firms for execution and capital commitment, not for their research per se.

The third driver of demand is the ever-increasing time pressure on buy-side analysts. They rely on direct communication with experts (sell-side analysts, frontline industry experts, etc.) who can provide them real-time insight and market-moving information. They do not usually have the time to conduct in-depth industry research. The more they can outsource to experts, the easier their job is.

We are adding this profile of ContactSpan to our Social Networking Site Guide

We’re down to the wire — we have turned in the final manuscript to our publisher, AMACOM, and we have about a month to copy-edit our book, The Virtual Handshake. We’ve got an exhaustive book, but we think a few more real-world examples and stories will help make it a great book.

Many thanks to the numerous people who sent in stories in response to our previous call for queries; most ended up in the book. A truly excellent or unusual one could still be slipped in. We also will continue to highlight success stories here on this blog, in articles we write, our speeches, and more.

Here’s our laundry list of what we’re looking for. The top priorities are:

• A story about someone whose life has dramatically changed by his/her use of online business networks. The person started a new business, found key clients, and in other ways has very successfully leveraged this technology.

• An example of a distributed conversation between two or more bloggers on a non-technical, but business-oriented subject, e.g., blogger #1 person posted something, blogger #2 commented on blogger #1’s post and also created a longer response on their own blog, which blogger #2 linked to when he “answered” on his own blog. Ideally, this should result in a valuable action, e.g., getting a sale or a job.
• An example of a business-oriented personal website from someone who is an employee, not an entrepreneur or solo professional, and that is NOT a blog, e.g., it contains articles, a personal profile, etc.
• A story about how online communication differs from face-to-face communication at a very personal level, e.g., you didn’t realize the person you were dealing with had some sort of disability, because it never came up in the online interaction.
• A business-to-employee community that has some kind of public face. Doesn’t have to be much publicly visible - just need something to point to that’s not entirely behind firewalls.
• Business-oriented success story about using online tools, e.g., Meetup, to organize groups for face-to-face interaction.

  We’re also still looking for the following:

• A positive story about someone who proactively protected/reclaimed his online privacy without sacrificing online visibility - maybe after an identity theft incident, for example.
• An example of trusting someone online a bit too quickly, e.g., they revealed proprietary information or intellectual property which the other person took advantage of.
• An example of viral marketing / buzz generation for a product within business-oriented communities — NOT tech-oriented and NOT consumer-oriented.
• The absolutely greatest, most interesting, most unique, most powerful story you’ve ever heard about online (not hybrid) networking.

If you have experienced one of these stories yourself, or can point us to someone who has, or can accomplish it yourself this week, please submit it to us ASAP. The deadline for submissions is this Monday, November 8, at midnight EST. In the interest of time, please submit the complete story/example, not just a query to see if we’re interested. Be sure to include your email and phone number so we can follow up with any questions.

a) This is a great opportunity to tell your story in a major publication.
b) Please help!

Whichever of the two statements above motivates you, please ignore the other one!

Maybe I’ve missed this before, but my friend Bill Vick was just featured in and called my attention to these LinkedIn case studies. The examples include several areas, including hiring employees, finding a job, making deals, and finding experts.

I teach classes in conjunction with LinkedIn (we’re on hold at the moment and will start up after the first of the year). I also really use it. I used LinkedIn to find our literary agent, to connect with the person who’s writing our foreword, to find success stories for our book, to connect with experts in related fields, and to identify and connect with a critical contact for my next book project. I don’t use it a lot (rather, I don’t initiate a lot of requests), but that’s not the point — the point is that I have used it very successfully when I used it.

David Teten’s two companies both use it very heavily — for recruiting and for finding experts. I’m particularly interested in the aspect of finding experts, because I’ve often heard the argument that these sites are a waste of time because it’s just as easy to find people on Google. This is simply not true, either when you’re looking for extremely niche expertise or on a topic that a lot of people talk about, but that there are very few experts on.

My wife, who works for David finding these experts, has had several cases where there was simply so much information out there that it was nearly impossible to sift through Google to find experts. But on LinkedIn, the searches produced results that were much closer to a match. Structured search is valuable because it allows you to distinguish, for example, people who have actually worked in a particular industry from people who are consumers of that industry and just blog about it. Simply talking about something a lot doesn’t make you an expert.

What’s frustrating is that more professionals aren’t making their information available in these tools. Really — if you’re a professional and want to be found, list yourself everywhere possible. Copy and paste your information, and it only takes a few minutes per site. You don’t have to actively participate if you don’t have time — just make yourself searchable in a structured way. There really are people who are looking for you in these sites and want to find you. As Dr. Philip Agre says, “The most fundamental way of finding people online is to help them find you.”

According to a new study from Harris Interactive and metasearch engine Dogpile, 23 percent of U.S. adults have used the Internet to search for information about their customers, co-workers, potential employees, and supervisors.
 

While I suppose I’m not really surprised that the number is so low, I’m thinking, “What the heck is everybody else doing?” — particularly when it comes to potential hires (only 10 percent do this). I can’t even conceive of hiring somebody without doing an Internet search on them, and yet 90% of employers don’t. That’s insane. It takes all of five minutes and may tell you all kinds of information about them that’s not on their resume — both good and bad.

What was particularly interesting, though, is that the most common reason people do this is not as background checks or looking for contact information, but mere curiosity. Curiosity is all well and good, but again, I’m just amazed that more people aren’t more purposeful in what they’re doing. Less than half of the respondents did it for background research or to prepare for a job interview. Again, that’s just crazy. Never go into a job interview, or a sales presentation, without getting every bit of information you can on the company in general and the specific people you’re meeting with.

It’s cliché, I know, but knowledge really is power.

Heather Hamilton, a senior recruiter for marketing talent at Microsoft, just did one of the most unusual recruiting ideas I’ve ever seen. Heather has asked her readers to link to this post from their blog resumes, and she’ll check out the resumes by reviewing her referrals.

The implication of this? If you don’t understand how to do what she’s asking you to do, you’re probably not (as) qualified to work in the marketing department at Microsoft.

We spoke with Heather for our chapter on job search in The Virtual Handshake for her take on how blogs are changing how people find jobs:

“Blogging is a great opportunity in the staffing industry, both for the recruiter and the job seeker (or future job seeker). Blogs represent conversations and provide more info to a recruiter than a resume can. Through a blog, a recruiter can understand not just the experience of the candidate, but how they work, their passion, the quality of their relationships with co-workers, their opinions. This creates a more dimensional snapshot of a candidate than a résumé. It is not unusual for a recruiter to do a web search of a known candidate to identify their online presence. By creating a professional blog, the job seeker can brand themselves beyond what is represented in a typical résumé format.

Blogs have the potential to dramatically change the way companies recruit, because of the relationship building opportunity. Where job boards provide a very transactional environment (active candidates search jobs and submit resumes, recruiters search resumes and contact candidates) for active job seekers, blogs allow for more of a long term approach for managing one’s career and for recruiting talent. As a professional, the best time to build a relationship with a recruiter is before you start looking for your next position. In an environment where large corporations can receive thousands of résumés a day, establishing a relationship through blogging (through your blog or the recruiter’s blog) can greatly benefit the seeker because blogs establish a dialog, which can create an advantage over the thousands of other applicants vying for the recruiter’s attention.

For the recruiter, who likely specializes in recruiting a specific type of talent (marketing talent, in my case), the opportunity to identify like candidates via blogging is huge. By engaging with a community of marketing professionals (through my blog or the blogs of marketing pros), I am able to interact directly with talent in my area of focus. I’m able to let the active seekers know whether I have something for them and I am able to market our hot new jobs to active and non-active leads and candidates. Blogging truly creates a win/win opportunity for the professional and the recruiter.

In short, if you’re looking for work, and you don’t have a blog, you’re missing out on one of your best vehicles for exposure and credibility.

Thanks to Cynthia Typaldos of Software Product Marketing for introducing us to Heather.

The Seattle Times reports that United Online is buying Classmates Online. Of its 38 million registered members, only 1.4 million paid a subscription fee. Translation: this is an attempt to monetize Classmates eyeballs.

We profiled Classmates as part of our network site guide.

David had a chance to have a conversation with Greg Head, ACT!’s former General Manager, about the need for increased privacy, interoperability, and personal responsibility as contact management and social networking software converge:

Contact management software will always be centered around a database of contact information that tracks basic name, addresses, and other data — combined with powerful methods of managing countless commitments and a history of all relationships. That said, we will be doing more contact management activities using an Internet browser or PDA phone, as opposed to just Windows applications. These new methods will allow more integration to the phone and to Web services that can integrate into contact managers — to scrub addresses, to integrate with accounting applications, or to share your relationship data with others.

Head also had some thoughts about Microsoft’s role in the social networking space, as well as centralized directory services like Plaxo:

I may be a little biased in this regard, but I think that Microsoft will have to make some fundamental changes to develop the level of trust that is required for people to track, share, and leverage social network information in a Microsoft-hosted world. In fact, even centralized public directory services such as Plaxo might not be able to meet every users’ needs because of concerns with privacy and inconvenience. These services might be useful for the user — but are not so useful for the recipient of the “update your contact information” request. As the centralized nature of some of these become known, people will be even more reluctant to send their contact data off across the Internet.

Ultimately, though, Head says it’s more about personal responsibility and process as the tools themselves:

The majority of salespeople and businesspeople are still fighting the first phase of this battle: just tracking all of their follow-up and project commitments in a reliable system. Contact managers provide the tools, but the habit of tracking all commitments and managing them effectively can be different for each person.

Stever Robbins has a lengthy and very useful Guide to Mastering E-mail Overload.

We are adding this profile of Monster Networking to our Social Networking Site Guide