I’ve launched a new blog focused exclusively on LinkedIn at www.LinkedIntelligence.com.

Why?

From the welcome message:

I believe that much of the reason for that growth is that LinkedIn does, overall, a very good job of delivering on its promise of being an efficient, time-conservative way of maintaining and leveraging your network of contacts. While you can certainly spend a lot of time there if you so choose, it has a strong appeal to busy professionals who understand the value of their network and want to be of service to the people they know and trust, but don’t want to spend a lot of time “networking”.

What I realized recently is that while there are dozens of excellent resources for the more highly active LinkedIn power users, there wasn’t really a source that delivered information with the same kind of efficiency that appeals to the majority of LinkedIn users.

I’ll cross-post somewhat here on The Virtual Handshake, but if you’re interested in a filtered, quality source of information about LinkedIn, I hope you’ll stop by and add it to your subscription list.

I’ll be speaking in London next week and hope that you will join us:

Straight from the Horse’s Mouth:
How Professional Investors Elicit Maximum Information in Minimum Time from Industry Sources

Sponsored by the Harvard Business School Club of London
Thursday, September 7, 6:30pm
Offices of McKinsey & Co., 1 Jermyn Street near Piccadilly Circus, London
RSVP and prepayment: http://www.hbsa.org.uk/cgi/hbs?do=index&page=event&event=222

Cost: £10.00

“Interviewing industry sources requires a broad range of skills which I didn’t learn in business school: rapport-building; how to open a conversation to start off on the right foot; how to close a conversation and keep the door still open. Nitron Advisors has helped me to interact with experts more effectively, learn more from them, and make better trading decisions. Nitron showed me how to ask the right questions… And how to help an expert teach me how to ask the right questions! Any investor without this skill set is at a significant disadvantage in the war for alpha.”
- Partner, Multistrategy/Convertible/Credit Arb $500M fund, New York, NY

As a professional investor, you speak every day with corporate management, with industry sources, and with other knowledgeable experts. However, are you getting as much information as possible? Do your sources pro-actively contact you with new investment ideas? Do you have access to the right sources for your business?

David Teten, CEO of research firm Nitron Advisors, will fill the gap. Come learn:

+ How can I learn the most information possible from industry sources?
+ What questions should I ask?
+ What are the killer phrases NOT to say?
+ How do I build a pool of knowledgeable sources in the industries in which I invest?
+ What questions prompt sources to share their most valuable information?
+ What are the legal and ethical guidelines that I should think about when speaking with sources?

There are countless books on how to read a balance sheet or an income statement. However, when you actually measure how professional investors spend their time, they spend perhaps half of it talking with management, attending conferences, and in other ways learning from industry sources. Yet, there’s not a single book on Amazon or course in business schools on how to do that effectively. We fill this gap.

Who is Nitron Advisors?

Nitron Advisors provides professional investors with precise answers to their questions about specific companies and industries, by tapping our exclusive Circle of Experts of thousands of knowledgeable industry insiders. You can learn directly from the Experts through private telephone consultations, in-person customized surveys, and interactive events. We provide access to senior executives, local managers, technologists, suppliers, customers, and regulatory observers. We specialize in connecting you with executives in transition.
By the nature of our business, we have developed an in-house expertise in elicitation, and developed this training program for our clients as a “User’s Guide” to our services.

“By talking with a Nitron Advisors expert, our…conversation led to north of a million dollar profit for us and our clients. Within 48 to 72 hours, I was trading facts with the actual person we wanted to be connected to, and that allowed us to form an extremely fast, investable idea.”
- Lyron Bentovim, Managing Director, SKIRITAI Capital,
New York Post, August 7, 2005

Biography of Speaker

David Teten is CEO of Nitron Advisors. David is also the lead author of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, the first business book about how to use online networks to accelerate sales and raise capital. He runs TheVirtualHandshake.com resource site and blog and co-writes a monthly column for FastCompany.com. David recently was named a “2005 Future HR Leader” by Human Capital magazine for Nitron Advisors’ unique use of social software for recruiting. David serves on the Advisory Board of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and of Accolo, a recruitment process outsourcer.
David is a frequent keynote speaker at finance and technology industry conferences and at such universities as Wharton, Columbia Business School, Yale, and Princeton. He formerly was CEO of GoldNames, an investment bank focusing on serving the internet domain name asset class. He has worked with Bear Stearns’ Investment Banking division as a member of their technology/defense mergers and acquisitions team, and was a strategy consultant with Mars & Co. David holds a Harvard MBA and a Yale BA.

I’m curious to see if anyone has data on the biggest providers of online network services. According to my sources, they include:

Yahoo Groups-90m users
MySpace-100m users (and many thousands more in the last day or so, no doubt)
Classmates.com-40m users
Neopets-30m users
Facebook-7.7m users

Jeff Weiner, SVP of Yahoo Search and Marketplace, reported at Yahoo Analyst Day on May 17 that Yahoo Groups has 90 million members. Does anyone have any more detailed information on this number? Are these 90 million members receiving and reading their Yahoo Groups emails, regularly visiting the Yahoo Groups website, or doing anything else to prove that they are “active” members in some way? Or does 90 million simply refer to the number of users who at some point in the past registered with a Yahoo Group, but who are not necessarily participating or involved in the group in any way anymore?

Thanks!

Do you want to break free of Microsoft’s grip? Use exclusively web-based apps, most of them free?

If you do, try reviewing Ismael Ghalimi’s list of ‘best-of-breed’ web apps, which together provide a reasonable approximation of the Microsoft Office Suite.

http://itredux.com/blog/office-20/my-office-20-setup/

We haven’t talked much about SMS on this site, but I’ve been playing with Google SMS, which is a useful service. (Yes, I know i’m late to the party with this…)

Google SMS is a new service that enables you to search for certain kinds of information with Google from a mobile phone or handheld device (such as a Blackberry), and returns your search results as text messages. Get phone book listings, movie showtimes, weather, facts, dictionary definitions, product prices from Froogle, and more.

For example (via Speakernet news): send “Pizza 91320″ to the phone number 46645 (GOOGL spelled with the numeric phone keys) and you will receive a text message back with all the pizza joints in that ZIP code.

Google SMS

The Presentation of Self in the Information Age
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5435.html

by John Deighton

Executive Summary:

In the past, we knew a lot about the seller of a product (through ads, marketing, or reputation) but little about the individual buyer. Times have changed. From the Internet to store loyalty cards, technology has made the marketplace into an interactive exchange where the buyer is no longer anonymous. The future market will likely be one in which personal information is shared and leveraged. Consumers who are willing to share their information will be more attractive to sellers and more sought-after than those who have bad reputations or refuse to participate. Key concepts include:

* Consumers will play an increasingly leveraged role in the marketplace by “branding” themselves and sharing personal information with sellers.
* Technology is making the idea of consumer branding a reality, but it is unclear how personal information will be used in the marketplace, or which uses will be the most beneficial to both buyers and sellers.
* Look deeper into loyalty programs for the societal and commercial, and positive and negative effects of sharing personal information in the marketplace.

more…

From Harvard Business School Working Knowledge:

The researchers identified four successful tactics for obtaining stretchwork that were common to both groups:

* Differentiate competence. Anyone hoping to advance must distinguish his or her performance on the job. This is particularly true, however, for contract workers—because they are paid for each short-term job, their employers are likely to subject their work to close, frequent evaluation.
* Acquire referrals. Because high-tech contractors tend to work with a number of clients, brokers, and fellow contractors, they enjoy a broader social network from which to draw referrals than most permanent employees. In the film industry—where most hiring is done based on a production manager’s previous experience with an individual—referrals are a vital aspect of getting any job, particularly if it stretches a worker in a new direction.
* Framing and bluffing. “This is one of the most creative attributes for obtaining stretchwork,” O’Mahony notes. “People who are good at presenting their prior experience in a way that allows for an easy translation to the desired job can narrow the gap between their past experience and future capabilities.” Adopting a hybrid job title to identify oneself—”director-screenwriter,” for example—can also help establish authority in more than one area.
* Discounting. Accepting pay below the market rate is a temporary disadvantage some contract workers are willing to accept, if it means gaining the experience and exposure that will lead to a new position. One technical writer put it this way: “I turned down solid offers from three companies, all paying over $100K a year…I would take a job at $55K if they’re using a totally new technology so I learn something…It’s like playing pool…You hit the green ball with the white ball, and the point is to place the white ball to get the next shot. So I take that job in order to learn skills for my next project.”

More…

Many business users of social networking sites have heard Mark Granovetter’s 1973 paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, which concluded that “weak ties”, rather than “strong ties”, were more helpful in finding a job. This is often used as an argument to justify connecting with as many people as possible in social networking sites, even with no more interaction than the connection request and its acceptance.

Granovetter’s study is great, but we have to know what the definition of a “weak tie” is that he was using for the purposes of his study. We can’t make our own interpretation of “weak tie” and then use his paper to justify our actions if we’re not using the same definition of “weak tie”.

So what does Granovetter himself say?

It is sufficient for the present purpose if most of us can agree, on a rough intuitive basis, whether a given tie is strong, weak, or absent. [Unfortunately, he was apparently wrong, as people actually don’t seem to be able to agree.] […] Included in ‘absent’ are both the lack of any relationship and ties without substantial significance, such as a ‘nodding’ relationship between people living on the same street, or the ‘tie’ to the vendor from whom one customarily buys a morning newspaper. That two people ‘know’ each other by name need not move their relationship out of this category if their interaction is negligible.

Every single person you meet doesn’t elevate even to the level of “weak” in his definition, nor do people whose “interaction is negligible”. No interaction = no tie.

Let’s look at what another expert has had to say on the topic. Valdis Krebs is one of the world’s top experts in Social Network Analysis (SNA) – the creator of InFlow, a software tool used for analyzing relationships within organizations to help teams improve their effectiveness.

From a March 2004 InfoWorld interview, Capitalizing on Communication:

IW: These projects were about strengthening ties within groups. Where does Stanford University Sociology Professor Mark Granovetter’s “strength of weak ties” idea fit in?

VK: People have a wrong impression about what a weak tie is. It’s not just a casual acquaintance. A weak tie used to be a strong tie; there was trust and shared knowledge. If I go to a conference today and meet somebody new, people will say “That’s a weak tie.” I say no, it’s an acquaintance tie. But if I also run into Peter from Disney, who I used to work with, that’s a weak tie that can be reactivated. A lot of Granovetter’s research on weak ties was based on people who had known each other better before.

Your “weak ties”, as referenced in the Granovetter study, are exactly the people a tool like LinkedIn is designed to help you stay connected with and leverage your relationships with. It’s former co-workers, customers, vendors, schoolmates. Those are weak ties as Granovetter defined them. You don’t need LinkedIn to manage your truly strong ties, because you interact with them every day/week/month.

I’m not saying there’s no value in those “weaker than weak” ties, aka “acquaintance ties”. Yes, some of those can become the weak ties that lead to real value. But to raise them to the point of real valuable — to action, not just presence — generally requires more interaction than just mutual consent to be in each other’s database.

But I do hope people will stop using Granovetter to justify their own “light linking” behavior. It’s a complete distortion of the findings of his study if you’re not using the same definition of “weak ties” that he did.

In the LinkedInnovators Yahoo Group, the perennial debate has re-surfaced about LinkedIn linking behaviors — is it better to connect with as many people as possible? Or only those you already know? Or somewhere in between?

In the course of the conversation, Barbara Dobrinsky Holtzman posed the question:

If you already know everyone you need to know to accomplish everything you’d like to in life, why bother to network at all?

Here’s my take on this:

I’m not saying you should never meet new people – that would be absurd. But most people haven’t even scratched the surface of the potential that exists in the network they already have. To answer your question as to why to network, even if you know almost everyone you need to know to accomplish everything you’d like to in life:

Information - To learn more about them and share more about me so that we might discover those as-yet-undiscovered opportunities to be of service to each other. To brainstorm. To share expertise and ideas.

Character – People can’t know your character from your LinkedIn profile, and only minimally from a blog. When it comes to hiring people for critical positions or contractual work, character becomes extremely important, and you need people who know you well enough to vouch for your character.

Competence – Your LinkedIn profile shows what you claim to know. A blog is a bit better. But it is only through interaction – through seeing someone’s expertise applied in context, that we really see just how much someone knows about what they’re doing.

Strength leads to action. For all the talk of the benefits of weak ties (a misinterpretation of Granovetter, though, as I’ve written about before), there is in networking the concept of an “action threshold”. People have to know you well enough to be willing to take action on your behalf. Simply put, the better people know you, the more willing they are to do more for you (and you for them).

Can you honestly say that you have tapped into even a tiny fraction of the potential of the network you already have? What’s the point in adding a bunch more hypothetical potential when you haven’t even tapped into what’s there? It’s like buying more land to drill for oil when all you’ve done with the land you own is start drilling one or two wells, and you haven’t even surveyed the rest of it.

I frequently hear the argument for making more connections that, “You never know where your next opportunity might come from. If I don’t connect, I might miss that next opportunity!”

To my thinking, that’s “lack consciousness”. How much opportunity have you “missed” in your existing network because you haven’t really worked it?

The way I see it, there is more opportunity in my network than I know what to do with – than I can possibly ever act on. The purpose of my network, for me, is not to continue spreading like wildfire in search of new opportunities, but to filter out all the noise and let the really great opportunities rise to my attention.

In the course of that activity, a few really interesting people will get added, but I don’t really seek them out just for the purposes of making new contacts. They come naturally as a part of the more focused activity, and they are typically far more oriented to doing something immediately that’s of mutual benefit.

David and I will be participating in Fast Company’s third annual blog-a-thon, FC Now BlogJam 2006 this Monday and Tuesday, 8/14-8/15. I’m a long-time reader of the magazine, and David and I have had a monthly column about virtual business relationships there for nearly two years now.

Some of the notable participants in this year’s BlogJam include:
* Lloyd Alter and Nick Aster, TreeHugger
* Grace Bonney, Design Sponge
* Anastasia Goodstein, Ypulse
* Craig Newmark, craigslist
* Ilya Vedrashko, MIT Advertising Lab

Posting on the FC site is limited to the invited participants, but comments are open to everyone, so come join the conversation!

UPDATE 8/15/2006: My contribution is up: Are Our Expectations of Social Software Too High?