Continuing our series of posts on how LinkedIn has made a difference in users’ careers, let’s focus our attention today on the advertising industry. Dave Smith is the CEO of Mediasmith, a media planning and buying agency, who found two of his biggest clients on LinkedIn.
Here’s what Mediasmith does (via LinkedIn Company Profiles)
On Tuesday, Brad Neuberg from Google’s Developer Program visited LinkedIn’s headquarters in Mountain View to give a presentation on Gears to the engineering department as part of our series of LinkedIn Tech Talks.
Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, and provides for a better user experience with a cross-browser plugin. Gears gets installed on a user’s machine (the same way any other plugin like Adobe Acrobat Reader does), and then provides a local database, worker pool, and a local web server.
Guest Author – Matt Raible
Last week, I attended O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention (a.k.a. OSCON) in Portland, Oregon. This was the 5th year I’ve attended (and spoke) at OSCON. I really like the diversity of open source projects and languages discussed at this conference. You can find always find good sessions on Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and even Java. Of the many sessions I attended, the ones I learned the most from were Google XML Pages by Harry Heymann and Laurence Gonsalves and Even Faster Web Sites (PPT) by Steve Souders. If you didn’t get a chance to attend OSCON this year, you might try watching OSCON in 37 minutes by Gregg Pollack. This is a video where Gregg asks many speakers to summarize their talks in 30 seconds or less.
Many of you regular readers of the blog must have read my earlier post on a question asked by Yao Ming, starting center of the Houston Rockets, on whether “participating in sports made an important difference in your professional life“. Yao Ming has been pleasantly surprised by the response from LinkedIn users to his question. In his own words:
“I’d like to thank the LinkedIn users for taking the time to respond to my question. I appreciate your many thoughtful answers and would like to thank you for the kind words and good wishes. I hope you will continue to support the rebuilding efforts in China to help deserving children find schools where they can learn in safety.”
As Director of Advertising Sales here at LinkedIn, I spend most of my time talking to companies about their marketing and advertising strategies and how LinkedIn can help them achieve their business objectives. One topic that comes up often is the idea that the employees of a company are now a very visible part of that company’s overall brand, thanks to the proliferation of profiles on social networks like LinkedIn.
First, it’s important to note that a business’ brand is much more than just a logo and a tag line – it’s a promise of value, a promise made and delivered by the employees of that company. Historically, that promise was communicated to customers through advertising, packaging, PR, promotions, merchandising and in-store experiences, and the only contact with the company’s employees came from salespeople, customer service agents and communications managers. The rest of the company’s employees where rarely exposed to customers.