You are what you clikced on, or, you are what sites you visited… this website discovery visualization tool tells you what other sites people also visited. It’s sort of like Linkedin for websites.

Below are some of my finding. Try it out youself

• Yelp’s site network: VirginAmerica is also connected with Yelp - my biggest surprise! Maybe VirginAmerica is targeting at all food networks for advertising purposes, because people use food sites especially when they are traveling? Interesting!

• Twitter’s site network: it’s all the tools that people use around twitter. The power of having API? Or a sign of improvement that Twitter needs?

• Difference between Facebook and Linkedin site networks:

It’s fun to play around with it. Try it yourself!

Tags: advertising, Application programming interface, linkedin, On the Web, Online Communities, social network, Twitter, website discovery, Yelp

I was trying to answer this question posted on LinkedIn Question. Unfortunately, it was closed. So I decided to post my thoughts on my blog. The question was: “How to sell many tons of lemons?”, posted by Susie Wyshak, who is trying to help a friend who grows lemons commercially in central California, using organic methods, to find a buyer for several hundred TONS of lemons (about 20 truckloads of 25 tons each; that’s 1,800,000 lemons) quickly, before they are too old.

People gave all different ideas: some direct contacts with potential buyers; some ideas through different channels. I like the Lemon Festival and Event idea. Here are my thoughts:

Approach 1: Full Scale Organic Lemon Festival & Event

Possible themes:

• Lemon Cooking Contest
• Lemon Drink Contest
• Lemon Concert
• Organic Lemon pick-up weekend for family

Key for this approach

• find the right event professional to plan & manage the whole event quickly
• get initial investment / sponsors

Pros of this approach:

• big enough to draw sponsors and media/PR
• has potential of making bigger money
• could even build a brand for this lemon grower for a longer term

Cons of this approach:

• it requires a lot of planning and event management resources
• it might be helpful to outsource/contract this whole event to some event planning professionals; that means there will be some investment & risk first
• it needs to find the right event planning professionals very quickly

Approach 2: Simplified Organic Lemon Festival & Event

Possible themes:

• Organic Lemon pick-up weekend for family & friends
• Organic farm learning/education tour for students & kids

Key for this approach

Generate awareness & interest through social media:

• post these events to all social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Meetup) and related blogs
• take photos & videos of the lemon farm & share them on Youtube & Flickr

Pros of this approach:

• small enough to avoid the early investment & risk
• could build a brand for this lemon grower for a longer term

Cons of this approach:

• it requires self-planning and event management resources
• the risk is if it can generate enough buzz / awareness / interest

I hope that this lemon farmer can sell his lemons successfully. If she/he has the lemon event, I’ll go with my family and friends for sure Let me know what you think by posting your comments below!

Tags: Event planning, Event Planning and Production, food, linkedin, Organic farming

As a lot of you know, I follow several companies in my library. LinkedIn is one of them.

People discuss how sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter can monitize. These sites have been trying different things to find the right answer for themselves too. One old technique is to monitize the content (hey, content is still king). LinkedIn is showing some banner ads on their more and more popular Answers pages. See my screen shot below:

Tags: content, Facebook, linkedin, social media, social network

Happy Friday!

To save time and put things in a more organized way, I decided to create some pages in this blog as my library, that captures my regular finding around the topics that I’m interested, such as Crowdsourcing, Mobile, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and China.

I update these pages in stead of writing all different small posts. Check out these pages if you are also interested in these topics

For other topics that I have more to say, I’ll continue to write as separate posts.

Tags: amazon, china, Facebook, linkedin, mobile, Online Communities, social network, Twitter

Here I am - back from my crazy two weeks of working on one online application project. It feels so good to finally open a page and start writing

And the topic has to be LinkedIn again. They simply have a lot of news and interesting stuff to pay attention to. Now they plan to launch its own ad network. Here are my thoughts:

• It is almost like a “why not” thing. The tricky part is the timing of getting ad network into its portofolio. Other social networks seem to do this in their early stages (MySpace, FaceBook…). LinkedIn takes a step by step approach, as they always do for their other features. They don’t push too many or too big things all at once. In stead, they chunk them out and digest piece by piece. This gives them time & resource to focus on and reduces the risk of getting wrong into any unclear directions.
• Don’t worry about money. Money comes not because you open your wallet or you invite them to come. Money follows people, idea and real value. Adding advertising to monetize your product / site is important. But if you do that only for the sake of doing that, money usually doesn’t flow in. In stead, focus on the value you create and the people you serve, money usually flows in itself.

Here are two articles on LinkedIn’s ad network news: one is from TechCrunch; the other is from Hitwise.

Lastly, this slide shows the profile of LinkedIn users:

Tags: ad networks, linkedin, social media, web marketing

I really like LinkedIn’s overall approach. Yeah - I have posted 2-3 blogs about LinkedIn within a week! (full disclosure: I don’t work for LinkedIn; LinkedIn is not paying me

Now, you can have LinkedIn App on your IPhone and it looks pretty neat. It is simple and slim. They don’t try to make it fancy with a range of fancy functions, which is probably why it is a good business app. There are only four major things you can do with your LinkedIn App (you can see the pic & detailed information from ReadWriteWeb post). But it gives enough updates about your business network from 4 quick glances.

LinkedIn is really taking the lead on business applications, both on the web and on the phone. I like their approaches for several reasons:

1. Make it simple. People would rather use one thing that really get one job done quite well, even it’s small, than one giant thing that doesn’t get the job(s) done very well. LinkedIn UI, user flow, and features are all very simple. You wouldn’t feel overwelmed when you spend time on it.
2. Take small steps slowly. LinkedIn didn’t launch a lot of features at one time. They did add new features from time to time. That gives them time to test & learn, while they figure out what users really care about. They took the same approach in their web UI redesign.
3. Stay with #1 & #2. If you find something that really works for you, you might want to stay with them until you have much better approaches that worth taking the risk of trying. LinkedIn keeps being simple and making small changes graduately.

The business apps market is huge and there are not a lot of good apps for now though. If other business app providers could keep these learning in mind, hopefully we’ll see a lot more good business apps available for us. So I don’t have to write about LinkedIn 3 times a week

Tags: business app, iphone, linkedin, social, social media, social network

LinkedIn is really doing interesting things based on their existing platform and the database they have. They just launched a new feature “Companies” in Beta this week.

I was shocked when I took a look at what they have under each company’s profile. Some features are the result of partnering with BusinessWeek. Overall, each company has one branding page within LinkedIn, not built by the company itself, but by its employees data (no matter if/how the company wants to build this brand page)…Hoho, this is getting really interesting

Some data/features related to individual users:

1. there is a company introduction section, pulling in BusinessWeek’s existing company profiling data. No big deal.
2. you can see other employees’ names within your current company and “Popular Profiles”. No big deal either.
3. what’s interesting is you can see “New Hires” & “Recent Promotions & Changes”. What? Yeah, I can’t believe this! What a bold and smart idea of user generated content!
4. “Open Jobs” is a good information source for job applicants who are interested in one particular company. No one needs to go to other job sites any more.

Some data/features related to companies:

1. what’s the most interesting one is “Career Path” - Before & After! That’s really a smart way of pulling out & analyzing job profile data! It’s definitely helpful to see the trend for each company on this.
2. “Employee are most connected to” is another interesting one.
3. “company locations” section is another way of letting the employees tell you how the jobs are distributed.
4. Some other data includes “common jobs, top schools” and “median age”, “Male x%” & “Female x%”.

This is definitely another example of showing how powerful user generated content is. Employees define what the company is! I think soon they might have salary info too, like Glassdoor.com (one company rating & review sites with salary poll).

Last two things that they are doing in the Beta version of this “Company” feature are:

1. they do allow you to Remove your profile from certain sections, like “New Hires” or “Recent Promotions” (Good for them to have this option!).
2. they proactively ask for feedback if you see anything incorrect in each company profile.

I believe that there are probably a lot more interesting things to play with LinkedIn database, and other social networking sites too! Data is the biggest asset. Good job, LinkedIn.

Tags: data, linkedin, social network, social networking

• research data around “yellow page shift to search” on LinkedIn Answers
• future of marketing on LinkedIn Answers
• LinkedIn company profile (trend on career path from one company to another)
• LinkedIn event

Tags: crowdsourcing, linkedin, research, social media, social network

A nice Italian restaurant that I just visited this week

I become more and more active on LinkedIn. The site’s functionality and navigation have been improved over time. This really unleashed the power and beauty of getting connected with others in the professional area. I started indicating my status, asking questions and answering other people questions. Below is one answer that I posted on online/offline topic:

Q: How can offline marketing support online marketing and vice versa
Asked by Ann Lacres | 9 days ago in Internet Marketing | Closed

A: (Shuai’s answer was selected as a Good Answer)
“If you step back a little bit, it is actually a cross-channel or multi-channel question that a lot of people are trying to address. There is no perfect answer to this.
The #1 key success factor is to design & plan all your marketing activities by following your customer’s cross-channel foot-prints. This requires the understanding of your customer’s cross-channel behavior & preference. Without knowing how your customers interact with all your online / offline channels, it is almost impossible to create a good customer cross-channel experience, which is your goal.
The #2 success factor is to make your marketing campaign viral enough to be shared both online and offline. Why you want your offline support online and online supports offline? You want to better optimize the two of them simultaneously, so both experiences can help your sales & conversion. To achieve your goal, you need to provide some tactical tools for your customers to spread the word simultaneously online & offline. Other people have given some specific examples below. For example, have link in offline campaign; online promo to be used offline…The general success rule is to make your marketing campaign viral enough for them to go online or offline easily.
#3, in terms of measurement, it’s better to plan your overall sales number in one combined bucket (online & offline). It’s good to know both numbers, but it doesn’t matter if you convert the customers online or offline, as long as you convert them :)”

Full conversation
Shuai’s LinkedIn Profile

Tags: linkedin, social media, social network, web marketing