Linqia

We're recruiting 3 brands to pilot our influencer outreach platform with a $10,000 credit

2012-02-10T19:23:00.021+01:00

Linqia is inviting up to three national brands or agencies currently engaging in influencer outreach programs across the social web to pilot our proven platform.

Over 20 brands have activated social media campaigns on the Linqia platform over the past 12 months. We are a San Francisco based company and our platform, operating in stealth mode, helps brands reach and engage seamlessly with leaders of targeted online communities and groups. The results to date have been exceptional with campaigns achieving 300%+ higher engagement compared to other paid social media placements. Linqia's key differentiation point are the strong relationships with really passionate group leaders who are trusted amongst a concentrated community of people congregating around a common interest or topic.

Brands interested in reaching mom + parenting communities or home + garden communities in North America with social media campaigns intended to spark conversations or other forms of social actions (sharing, likes, follows, plays, etc) have a unique opportunity to participate in a case study where Linqia will contribute 70% of the campaign cost (up to $10,000 in value).

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More About Linqia

With Linqia, brands tap into advocates and enthusiasts across the social web. Brands are seamlessly matched with influential Group Leaders, the gatekeepers of powerful flourishing communities. The results translate into increased awareness, sales, market research and much more.

If you are a brand or agency that would like to be a part of this exclusive pilot campaign, please contact Linqia's CEO Maria Sipka. maria.sipka@linqia.com

Calling all engineers, Linqia's hosting a happy hour Thursday, Feb. 9th!

2012-01-31T02:25:00.022+01:00

Hi! We're Linqia, and we want to meet you.

Linqia is the place for influential content curators with an engaged following on the social web. We add the human touch to the curation process.

We are recruiting engineers who will play a critical role in Linqia’s growth.

Thursday February 9th Linqia will be throwing a happy hour to meet engineers. There you will meet CEO Maria Sipka, featured in the video below along with other team members.

If you are an engineer--tired of being treated like a cog in the wheel at your current company--you might consider Linqia.

Join a team where you will have the opportunity to completely change the landscape of the web. Interested in bringing a positive disruption to content creation, distribution and communities? Join us for wine, beer and munchies next Thursday, 5pm-7:30pm at District bar at 216 Townsend St. at 3rd Ave.

Questions? Email Maria.Sipka@linqia.com or 415.623.4442.

Google+ turns against Facebook, Twitter and other social network search results

2012-01-17T01:34:00.001+01:00

Google+ is innovating at lightening speed. Latest news hot off the press is that Google merges Google+ into their search engine, in a service called "Search plus Your World". Google+ offers users to search the public web as well as private content from Google+ circles, photos and posts and other Google services such as Picasa.

Google+ profiles will be a part of the Google search, meaning that when you search for a person Google will finish your search query with the most likely in-your-Circles match. Google, in other words, is assuming that you’re looking for someone you know and not some random person with the same name. Similarly, when you search for a topic, Google will helpfully return results with “prominent people” who are experts in that topic, and lets you add them to your circle directly from the results page.

To use Search plus Your World you need to be signed in to Google+ and searching on Google’s secure search at https://www.google.com. Google has also added a button letting users switch between Search plus Your World and the traditional search.

As Google sees it, you’re getting more relevant results from people you've chosen to connect with. However the social media industry are not convinced and the launch has sparked criticism. Critics are not happy about Google only showing results from their own social network and disregarding Facebook, Twitter and others.

Twitter in particular pounced on Google's search changes "bad for people". In a statement, Twitter spokesman Matt Graves said "As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users."

Google's reply was very clear: "We are a bit surprised by Twitter's comments, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer". Google’s agreement with Twitter gave the search engine access to public tweets. The agreement expired in July and was not renewed. Now Google is implying it was Twitter that chose not to renew the deal.

Twitter came back fast with a clear example in form of a tweet with an image by Twitter general counsel Alex Macgillivray. “Folks asked for examples,” he wrote. “Here’s what a user searching for ‘@WWE’ will be displayed on the new @Google.”

Clearly, the results show the World Wrestling Entertainment’s website, Google+ page and other relevant Google+ profiles — but no Twitter page. Macgillivray’s example shows that, at least in some cases, people who are searching for a Twitter handle will no longer necessarily find its page at the top of Google’s results, though it varies from case to case. Other voices have suggested that the solution may be Google completely omitting search results from any social network.

Latest news is that the Federal Trade Commission will include Google+ in its ongoing probe of Google. According to Bloomberg, The FTC sees the launch of Google’s social network as relevant to its investigation into whether Google is violating antitrust laws by giving its own services favorable treatment.

So what do you think? Is Google crossing the line when people can't find the best possible search results because Google is favoring their own services? Or are we just forgetting that Google isn't a public service but a business? And most important of all, should Google include social media data in the search results or should they just go back to showing results that reflect the collected view of all Web users?

Linqia case study: 20,581 people engage with Moonit and their Love Calculator

2011-11-14T14:42:00.003+01:00

Moonit, a New York based company offering Daily relationship horoscopes and Compatibility test through astrology approached Linqia to run several engagement campaigns to create awareness around their recently launched application. 24 online groups reaching close to 2 million people across multiple social networking platforms in the Spanish speaking market were invited to participate offering their members to try the Love Calculator for free.

The online groups selected focused on singles, students, love, friendship and the gay community.

Here are some examples on how the group leaders shared Moonit's content with their members:

Erasmusu, a community for exchange students across Europe, were creative and fun in sharing Moonit content in their various sub groups ("Real maths are hard, "Love maths" are cool"), making it relevant to their members and using several social channels:

The Infosingles community also shared the content in different ways and in multiple channels using both their community, Facebook page, Twitter and newsletter list:

Shangay, a leading Spanish gay community also loved the idea of Moonit and wanted to share it with their members. They selected the banner content and wrote an article explaining the Moonit concept:

Carlos Valladolid is a young creative professional with several groups and a blog targeting young people through engaging and fun content:

Festuc is a community targeting young people interested in nightlife, love and friendship. The community leader shared Moonit in the community and also included the application in their weekly newsletter reaching over 400 000 people!

The combination of Moonit's engaging content and creative and active group leaders gave fantastic results to all of the 24 participating groups who over-performed on their estimated clicks!

20,581 individuals have engaged with Moonit across these campaigns, which is 5,584 over the estimated 14,977 engagements Linqia was promising to deliver. Advertising partners launching campaigns through the Linqia platform only pay on performance and any engagement delivered over the estimated clicks are free!

Clicks vs Visits: why analytics tools show different results

2011-11-09T12:39:00.002+01:00

We're often asked why the clicks vary from the analytics platforms our advertisers use to track their clicks to the clicks registered through the Linqia platform. Digging deeper into this topic, you'll discover that it's a common question asked by advertisers using various platforms across the web. We will explain the reasons that pinpoint the difference.

Firstly, it's important to distinguish between a click and a visit:

The number of clicks show the number of times a person clicks on your content - a banner or a link.
Visits indicates the number of unique sessions created by your visitors. A unique session is a connection between a user and your website.

Google sheds light on this distinction within their Help section for Analytics and in summary, the main reason why the sets of results don't match are due to:

A visitor may click your content multiple times. When one person clicks on one content item multiple times in the same session, AdWords will record multiple clicks while Analytics recognizes the separate page views as one visit. This is common behavior amongst visitors engaging in comparison shopping.

A visitor may click on your content item, however the page does not fully load due to navigating to another page or by clicking their browser's Stop button. In this case, the Analytics tracking code is unable to execute and send tracking data back to the Google servers. However, AdWords will still register a click.

Whilst Google AdWords automatically filters invalid clicks from your reports, Analytics reports the resulting visits to your website.

If a visitor who clicks on your content item has either javascript or cookies disabled, this visitor won't be recorded in Analytics, but AdWords will still register the click.

There are steps you can take to minimize any discrepancies:

The correct Google Analytics Tracking Code is implemented on your landing page
The Google Analytics Tracking Code is in the right location in your HTML source code (i.e not at the bottom of your page)
The auto-tagging parameter is present in the URL of the landing page that the visitor ends up on
You are not using a combination of auto-tagging and manual campaign tracking parameters
Paid visits are not being filtered out in your profile

Advertisers using the Linqia platform can be assured that their clicks are genuine and safeguarded by fraudulent activities. All clicks are tracked by an integrated 3rd party tracking platform openx which is used by over 150,000 sites to track the results of millions of campaigns.

Digital Marketing Trends for 2012: Online ad spend to grow by over 20%

2011-11-08T12:20:00.004+01:00

6S Marketing recently published an infographic on the Digital Marketing Budget Trends for 2012 highlighting an increase on digital marketing spend:

Key consumer insights:

35% of today's consumers spend 180 minutes or more online per day
20% of google searches by month are for local businesses
57% of internet users search The web everyday
46% of daily searches are for information on products or services

Activities consumers engage with online:

94% check email
87% search
78% do product research
75% get news
72% pass time
66% buy a product
61% use social networks
59% search "How To" info
32% rate product or service

Highlights on the Digital Marketing Spend:

28% of organizations are moving their marketing budget to digital channels
24% of overall marketing was spent on digital marketing in 2011
64% say they plan to increase budget for SEO
70% say they intend to increase investment on third party social media services such as Facebook.
54% increased their inbound marketing (blog, social media, SEO etc) budget in 2011
Companies say that the social media sites that have generated most costumers are the Company blog and LinkedIn (57%), followed by Twitter (48%) and Facebook (42%)

The majority of companies understand the importance of having a great online presence and the online marketing is in constant growth.

Projected trends for 2012:

Search marketing will lead the spending for interactive media followed by Display ads, E-mail marketing, Social media and Mobile marketing
Online ad spending in the U.S. will grow by over 20% in 2012
Mobile ad spending will reach over $1,1 Billion and over 75% of marketers plan to include mobile in their budgets
Money spent to place ads on Social Networking Sites will increase from $1,4 Billion (2011) to $2,5 Billion

2012 looks to be an exciting year for the digital marketing business as more and more organizations allocate an increasing portion of their budget to an online presence. Brands need to identify their target groups and once found, listen and understand their needs. Brands need to be where their prospective customers are and as consumers spend more time online it's natural for the brands to follow.

Why High Sharers are Important to your Business?

2011-10-26T19:07:00.006+02:00

Last week I saw a musical in Barcelona and absolutely loved it! I loved it so much that I immediately raved and recommended it to my facebook friends. I was able to share the happiness I felt coming out of the show, encouraging my friends not to miss out.

Today online channels have become a way to both ask and make recommendations. When was the last time you bought something important and you didn't reference a review site? Or ask your friends on Facebook when hesitating between various brands or models?

Mashable recently published an info-graphic featuring data from M Booth and Beyond, analyzing the social consumer and the way we share online.

Some notable facts:

53% use Facebook to interact with a brand

40% liked a product on Facebook

20% use Facebook to research products at least once a week

42% wrote an online post about a product or a brand

33% wrote a product review online

The info-graphic also shows the difference in efforts we invest into researching a product depending on the nature – Low vs High involvement products. In high involvement products you can find more expensive and less frequently purchased products, like technology and holiday trips. For these products we seem to put more effort and time into the research phase, whilst less costly products, such as baby items, makeup and music are usually purchased with a minimum amount of effort.

Furthermore, the study differentiates between two types of online consumers. On the one hand we have the high sharers (20% of online consumers) who are young, do not put much effort into researching products online but do recommend products, are brand loyal and own multiple internet devices. On the other hand we find the low sharers (80% of online consumers) who are older than the high sharers, put high involvement in researching products online, care more about quality then brand image, is less brand loyal and is more likely to purchase products as a result of research. Interesting conclusion: high sharers are 3x more likely to recommend a product online.

According to the study, 3 different channels influence the social consumer, each one with their sub channels:

Earned channels (ratings and reviews sites, news articles, word of mouth and blog posts)
Owned channels (brand website, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube videos)
Search channels (paid search and organic search)

The Top 5 influential online channels are:

Search results
Brand website
Ratings & Reviews sites
News articles
Online ads

So what does all this research mean for a brand or business? It's no longer enough to buy an online ad. A combination of all channels will ensure a higher chance of reaching the core target. And what should a brand or business do?

1st step: Identifying the High sharers in your Business – who are they and where can we reach them?

2nd step: Offer them content that people will want to share, both inside the community and in other channels.

Our strong philosophy at Linqia to best reach any target audience is to be a part of their natural environment - the communities and online groups they are a part of. And to join the conversation, brands need to provide valuable and highly engaging content that leaders can share in a natural non salesy way.

Engagement beyond the Facebook "Like"

2011-10-19T14:03:00.004+02:00

If you’re not on Facebook you don’t exist. How many times have we heard that? And as Facebook grows we find more and more business pages there. All of them strive to get as many "likes" as possible, as many fans as possible. But what does a "like" really mean?

I wanted to share some highlights from a report Exacttarget published exploring "The Meaning of like":

Only 42 percent of active Facebook users agree that marketers should interpret "like" to mean they are a fan or advocate of the company.
93 percent of Facebook users engage in some form of "like" behavior at least monthly.
74 percent "like" something posted by a friend on Facebook.
52 percent click a Facebook "like" button on another site (news site, blog, website).
44 percent "Like" something posted by a company on Facebook.
45 percent "Like" a company Facebook page.
For most of the survey respondents a "like" was a great way to express approval for a specific piece of content.
Younger consumers (aged 15-24) tend to use "like" for purposes of self-expression and public endorsement of a brand.
Consumers aged 25 and older are more likely to expect something of value in exchange for their "like."
Consumers tend to view a "like" as a way of bookmarking content and sharing information with friends—not a form of consent for marketing.
69 percent of 65 or older Facebook users have never liked a Facebook page.
30 percent of 35-44 year old Facebook users have liked 11 or more Facebook pages.
Frequent brand-likers also express a greater expectation of having the company's name appear in their profile, sharing brand information with friends, and interacting with the brand.
46 percent of Facebook users indicate that a "like" means that they "sometimes" are giving a brand permission to contact them.
56 percent of respondents indicated that marketers should not access even public profile information after they "like" a company on Facebook.

Do you feel identified? For me personally, there may be many more reasons to click a like button:

Interesting news: to keep me updated on the information that interests me.
Buddy tip: a friend has "Liked" and curiosity makes me visit the page. The chances are high of me liking the same things as my friend.
Good cause: Show me in solidarity, to support a good cause. Just today I "liked" the AECC's (The Spanish Association Against Cancer) campaign page for the International Breast Cancer Day.
Contests: Who doesn't want to win a trip?
Temporary interest: a special campaign that is in my interest at that moment, but maybe not next month.

Does liking these pages mean that I am an advocate of these brands? Well, sometimes yes, sometimes no. But brands should definitely not count on it.

There are countless blog posts about the correlation between the likes and the level of engagement a page inspires is not always related according to data recently made public by Facebook.

Facebook has created a new feature to show the success of a page beyond the “likes”. The feature, called “People Talking About,” calculates user-initiated activities on a page, including posts, comments, Likes, mentions, shares, poll votes, photo tags and check-ins.

This shows how much interaction and engagement a particular page has and the importance of creating high level content. It definitely favors those pages that work have to create great content that people want to talk about and share. And from an advertiser’s point of view this is really valuable. It’s a great way to see if, apart from having many likes, the page also manages to keep the user's interest and inspire them to want to spread the message to their friends.

At Linqia, our aim is to connect brands that provide great and engaging content with niche communities so that they can share the content with their members. The "People Talking About" feature not only lets us know whether a page is engaging with their members, but also allows us to measure the impact specific actions have in the community, apart from just measuring the clicks. So definitely a step in the right direction to ensure that the Facebook pages fill the role they should, providing a unique space to interact and engage with their members.

Case study: Wool And The Gang and the Activagers Community

2011-10-05T11:27:00.002+02:00

Our team recently launched an engagement campaign for the American fashion brand Wool and the Gang. They offer do-it-yourself knitting kits and free video tutorials to make it easier to create the perfect piece. They were looking to create brand awareness and drive traffic to their website and provided selected groups trackable links to their website, images of their kits and a video tutorial. The members of the participating groups also received an exclusive 15% discount on a chosen kit.

One of the communities was Activagers managed by Russ King and a great example of how a community manager can effectively engage with members. Activagers is a community for people over 40 and is present in many European countries including Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, Spain and the UK. Apart from all the typical features of a community Activagers supplements these with a magazine, in which interesting news is regularly shared in addition to running a travel portal. They have more than 30 000 members and are growing rapidly.

Activagers decided to engage with their members in several ways. First, they created a completely new group titled 'Creative Design' where members were encouraged to share their opinion on the subject.

Links led the members to an informative and interesting article on knitting and the role it plays in today's fashion, always encouraging the members to express their thoughts.

In addition to the community, Activagers also chose to use additional channels to engage with members. This enabled them to reach members who may not enter the community regularily, but still interested in engaging with the content.

Ultimately Activagers were so inspired by Wool and the Gang that they decided to interview the founder, Lisa Sabrier and include it in their online magazine!

These examples show how a niche community, with a bit of creativity and will to engage with their members through fresh and interesting content, can achieve fantastic results. The secret lies in knowing what your members will find interesting, share it in a natural way that doesn't disturb the ecosystem of the community and using different channels. Activagers received a welcoming response from their members and in short time overachieved on their estimated clicks and received their full earnings and a high group rank.

How is a Ford Explorer post relevant in a community focused on inspirational stories?

2011-05-24T01:44:00.007+02:00

A member of the Then life Happens community received an email last week featuring the author's latest blog post titled Sometimes Lemons...Other Times, Life Throws You a 2012 Ford Explorer.

He felt quite annoyed and commented 'here is a totally inappropriate & irrelevant "commercial push" that might just have me unsubscribe from what has been a very useful community. Sad to see the breakdown of social ethics by people trying to make a quick buck."

I was curious to learn more about this community and understand where they possibly went off track. It's clear that the community leaders were approached by FORD or an agency to participate in a test drive and there would exist an expectation that the experience or story would be shared within the community. This is actually common practice amongst 'influencers' whether they be journalists, bloggers, community managers, twitter stars or prominent members of a community. In some cases, these influencers are paid for their posts or provided with an incentive in some form - such as a free use of a car for 1 week.

There are existing guidelines for influencers to operate within that make it generally accepted by readers/ members to be exposed to sponsored content:

The influencer makes it clear that they have been approached by the brand or agency to participate in the experience and have received an incentive (this is actually law in most countries)
The content or experience is of relevance and interest to the membership at large
Members aren't spammed blatantly by sponsored content

After reading about the community which states Then Life Happens was created to share experiences and life lessons with an intention to encourage, inspire, and motivate you to live a life beyond your imagination. We believe Your Story Matters and, through it, you can discover your amazing! I read some of the post which were truly inspirational such as If you're not sure, ask for help and Fork in the Road.

However I did struggle to see the 'meaningful' connection or context between the FORD explorer post and this inspirational community.

Whilst the post attracted a handful of positive comments, it does read more like a post from a car blog. If I were approached to participate in such an experience to share with my membership base around the topic of inspiration and motivation, I would have taken a slightly different approach:

Positioned the sponsorship in a more meaningful way focusing more on the journey my husband and I would be taking rather than the car (the car becomes part of the story through photographs and anecdotes)
Wrote a different headline that doesn't read like a glossy magazine advertisement
Not included the product photo that screams 'advertising' but rather included a snap of myself and my husband either picking the car up

And with most sponsored content, we would recommend creating a sponsored section of the community rather than leave your community guessing whether it's your own initiative or one that has been influenced by the brand or agency. Very similar to magazines that feature advertorials that look like editorial however it's clearly marked at the top of the page 'advertorial' or 'sponsored content'.

Here is an example of a community Social Media Examiner which clearly separates and marks it's sponsored content:

The unwanted parasites that lead to the demise of online groups

2011-05-21T20:29:00.009+02:00

What would happen if you barged into a room of 257 people who were discussing a topic - say influencer marketing and these people were in the midst of sharing resources, absorbing insights and you interrupted that experience to promote your service or product? The answer is simple. Most people in the room would think you were rude, had no manners, were selfish and they would feel disturbed or worse yet angry. They would want you out of that room as quickly as you came in.

Sadly, this is the behavior many people choose to display when they join online groups. They think - oh great! - here are all these people who are relevant to my company or me and I will be able to get what I need from these members. I label these people parasites and they come from the land of 'takington'. If only they knew how much damage they were causing themselves and the group and any hope of establishing a favorable reputation is gone in the instance they start to promote.

Here's a clear example.

I run a group on LinkedIN called Influencer Marketing which has over 200 members - all prominent and successful marketing, advertising and communications practitioners interested in the topic of influencer marketing. I never advertise our company, our products or services. I may share a blog post or a case study that would educate or inform the members which may make reference to my company. The rules are very clear - no commercial messages, self promotion or advertising. So the expectation of the group is that everybody abides by these rules.

In the last month I have encountered two members who upon immediately joining the group, promoted their company by posting about their 'special offer'. The first was around a wine club and the second was around a performance based marketing out of India. As soon as I received the notification in my inbox, I was angry, livid and especially with the second member - who I hesitated approving his membership, I was disappointed. I was angry because every single member in our group who opted in to be notified about new posts received that message. Every time this happens - when a message is delivered to members that is not relevant or interesting, attention is trust is diminished.

The experience pushed me to turn on all moderation settings and approve every single post which is time consuming and a not-so rewarding experience for members who have to wait for their post to be approved.

Here's a typical sequencing of events of how a parasite goes about their prospecting:

Step 1: Post self promotion (the parasite thinks he's really cool and doing his job well)

Step 2: Group members are notified about the self promotion (at which time the group starts to diminish in value)

Step 3: Very angry group moderator (in this case me) removes the post, kicks the member out of the group and makes an attempt to bring this behaviour to the members attention

Online groups present a significant opportunity to create awareness and prospective customers for your business however the approach needs to be respectful and smart. Here are some tips on how to effectively engage with target groups:

Join the group and explore how and where you can add value
Read and react to other members posts by liking, commenting or sharing the content you find interesting
Post valuable content or discussions and be alert to responding to any comments or questions
Leverage the group leader to advocate something of value that the members would be interested in such as an upcoming webinar, job opening or a case study you've published
Once you've established a good reputation and have a favorable standing within the group, it's OK to lightly plug something the members would be interested although you need to earn your right to take this action

It's quite simple - we just need to behave like professional, respectful human beings and think before we act.

TED's message to advertisers: reinvent, inspire and engage audiences

2011-03-23T02:28:00.005+01:00

With the emergence of the social web and low engagement rates from traditional advertisements, the pressure has been increasing for advertisers to be more inspiring, educational, informative and entertaining.

So imagine a future where advertisers and consumers are part of the same community, sharing ideas and engaging in a learning cycle, together.

TED recently announced their 'Ads Worth Spreading' initiative.

"Some people have an instinctive dislike of corporations and hate all marketing messages of any kind. But if you care about a better future, then corporations have to be part of that conversation. One way or another, they have a giant impact on the world. At our conferences, we engage with some of the world's biggest corporations in a constructive way. We'd like ongoing engagement on our website too -- and we'd like you to be part of it."

The challenge was created to solicit ads that raise the bar, elevate the craft and invent new forms of online engagement. In an engaging, compelling way TED captivated us to spend a good hour watching the various advertisements (who would have thought!).

Here's our three favorites (unfortunately TED does not enable video embed):

Pepsi refresh project
Salinha
The Girl Effect: The Clock is Ticking

"Because they run after the talks, we can let these ads run longer than a standard 30-second TV spot. That allows them to adopt a different tone. Less marketing spin, more authentic story-telling. We're excited at the possibility of the emergence of a new, longer form of communication that is more human and more compelling."

So imagine when communities make it a goal for sponsored content to be integrated into the community that enhances and builds on the existing community experience. Where advertisers or business partners are able to engage in a dialog with the community members based on creativity, authenticity, and a shared pursuit of the community's purpose.

Social networking, photo sharing and community activities on the rise

2011-03-08T01:23:00.003+01:00

Brands looking to engage with the European consumer will find comScore's 2010 European Digital Year in Review a must read. Social Networking sites have eclipsed most other activities and are a magnet for consumers to while away their day with 34 percent more time spent social networking versus last year. Sharing photos and participating in community activities are amongst the three leading categories.

Other interesting statistics:

Approximately four out of every ten internet sessions included a visit to a social networking site.
In the UK and France, total display ad impressions on social networking sites grew by 47 and 64 percent, respectively, while in Germany that number more than doubled.
In December 2010, viewers from Germany, the UK, and Spain spent more time watching online videos than those in the US, averaging 18.0, 17.0, and 16.2 hours respectively.
Smartphone ownership increased 9.5 percentage points in Europe during 2010 to 31.1 percent
IAB Europe reports that internet advertising is approaching a 20-percent share of total advertising spend, almost doubling its share over the last two years.

Whilst display advertising and click rates are increasing, brands are experimenting with various other platforms and tools to reach and engage consumers across social networking sites.

JOB: Business Development Manager (USA) at Linqia

2011-03-07T22:01:00.000+01:00

Linqia, an exciting and promising global start-up, recently launched their social advertising platform www.linqia.com which helps advertisers identify, connect and engage with online groups across multiple social networks.

Currently, as there is no such platform existing on the web, Linqia has a significant opportunity to establish its game changing platform as the market leader in the social media arena.

The company aims to service the global market, however needs to establish a strong footprint in the USA market before rolling out to other countries.

Linqia forms relationships with social networks such as NING, meetup, facebook and LinkedIN who have active groups or communities on their platforms and advertisers who have social media advertising budgets.

You will help drive the growth of Linqia’s market channel by sourcing and integrating USA based social networks and community platforms and report directly to the CEO.

POSITION OVERVIEW

As an Business Development manager you would be responsible for establishing partnerships with social networks and community platforms with the following primary duties:

1. Develop strategy and sales plan to roll out across the United States

2. Sourcing and closing partnerships (The position requires the ability to achieve specific monthly integrations)

3. Manage and support all phases of proposal development and new business process, coordinate logistics for new business pitches, manage and create content, and serve as project manager for proposal development in response to client requests for information

4. Managing our USA based prospect database

5. Additional duties may include representing Linqia at industry conferences and other duties that may be required.

CANDIDATE OVERVIEW

The successful candidate will be an inspiring, confident, hands-on professional with at least:

· 3-5 years of interactive business development, sales and/or marketing experience at innovative consumer facing web, app or mobile companies

· Phone or field based sales experience, with a demonstrable history of consistent high performance.

· Proven track record of success driving revenue through prospecting, creating new business and growing and retaining existing clients.

· Strong negotiation, influencing skills and an ability to persuade at the executive management level.

· Passionate about social media and the internet

· Understand how online technology works and the ability to explain in ordinary terms.

· Established Rolodex in USA preferred

· Must have effective telephone presentation skills, excellent written communication skills, and a proven ability to close deals. Must be able to update and create customised proposals demonstrating how Linqia can meet your clients’ needs.

· Fluent in English.

The successful candidate will also demonstrate the following abilities:

Intelligence: Acquires understanding and absorbs new information quickly and is motivated to learn.

Customer Focus: Provides satisfaction for both internal and external customers and creates partner relationships.

Entrepreneurial: Resourceful, figure-it-out-and-get-it-done mentality, and a track record of creating successful relationships.

Passion to win: Thrives in a competitive environment, does what it takes to be THE market leader.

Passion for Technology: The ability to present cutting edge technology solutions to prospective partners looking to optimize their revenue.

BENEFITS

· Base remuneration + commission

· Fast growing and exciting company with incredible potential: be one of the founding team members and surrounded by experts in social media

· International team (Italian, Australian, New Zealand, British, South African, German, Spanish) and international opportunities

· Values based culture – strong ethics and high level of integrity

INITIALLY 3 MONTH CONTRACT WITH FLEXIBLE WORKING HOURS AND OPPORTUNITY FOR LONGER TERM RELATIONSHIP

If you would like to be considered for an opportunity with Linqia, please submit your application to jobs@linqia.com TODAY!

Group Leader Interview: Norbert Keil, IT-Connection, XING

2011-01-06T13:41:00.011+01:00

Norbert Keil is the group moderator of XING's IT-Connection group - a group which recently participated in a community engagement campaign with Astaro - a leading global IT security vendor.

Norbert shared with us his learning's and insights into how best to partner with brands to ensure everybody wins including the groups' members, the advertiser and the groups' leaders.

What was your motivation behind creating the IT-Connection group on XING?

My motivation was to support my sales activities and to get more visibility in the web.

What is the value for members joining the group?

Business -networking including high level IT-knowledge.

What motivates you to engage your members?

Activity is the key for an efficient group, otherwise your group has no distinctive feature.

How much time do you invest into your group?

Approximately 20 hours / week, sometimes less or more

What benefit do you think can brands offer a group?

Brands are able to create a win-win situation within the group. The group gains knowledge, the brand gains visibility.

What do you think about engagement campaign initiated by brands within groups?

The campaign has to be well prepared and coached. The approach within social networks is different to traditional advertising.

What were you biggest concerns, regarding the seeding of branded content within groups?

The biggest concern was the success of the project. If we took to much advertising content, the whole campaign could fail.

How did your members respond to content provided by a brand?

The response was very positive.

How did you feel working close together with a brand, whilst offering the brand’s content to your community?

I tried to put oneself in the role of the brand, in order to fulfil the prospects.

What was positive/negative regarding the workflow?

The project team was open minded and very professional. My personal time frame was short.

To accept a sponsorship/ engagement campaign, what does a brand need to offer to you?

The whole package should fit: concept – content – flexibility – budget

In which case you wouldn’t accept an offer?

If the package does not fit.

How do you invest the earnings of engagement campaigns?

We invest in the group and in new campaigns.

Which 5 tips would you give any brand trying to engage with members of a group today?

Please consider: the approach within social networks is different to traditional advertising.
Avoid pushy direct advertising
Occupy oneself with the group and try to understand the need and wish
Please try to follow any of your discussions, in order to react within short term
Please take care of your online profile. This should be up to date & include an actual business-picture

What are your personal 5 best practises to engage your members?

Content is king – actuality, complexity, interesting, sometimes comprehensive, sometimes specific,
Neutrality of the moderator – team
Balanced combination of on- and offline activities
Balanced combination of sponsored and group-member activities
Co-operations with other group / moderator in order to create win-win-situations

What was your biggest key learning from this pilot?

The number of participants for the free trail package was pretty high.

Insights from first community engagement campaigns through the Linqia platform

2010-12-16T14:10:00.011+01:00

This week we released our first community engagement campaign through the Linqia platform for e-dreams and Switzerland Tourism. They were small campaigns with the primary purpose to test the platform and validate our assumptions as to how each stakeholder would use the platform.

Let me just say that it was an incredible experience and no matter how much you plan and 'think' about all the workflows and features behind closed doors - nothing beats the real world taking your platform for a spin.

Over the past 3 weeks, we've integrated 6 social networks reaching 17'118'265 people through 8,636 groups mainly in Spain. Searching for a topic will likely yield a few or a lot of results. Here are some search terms and number of groups that were found:

E-dreams chose to inform target groups of travelers around the best airports in Spain. They provided trackable links to their blog Los Mejores Aeropuertos de Espana, an image charting the results of the study and some additional information. Two groups were selected on the SigoJoven platform reaching a total of 190 members. Sigojoven's community manager chose to integrate the campaign into one of their groups:

The results within 24 hours:

135 people visited the story
15 people clicks on the content leading them to the e-dreams blog post

Now consider the following, when multiplying such a campaign across dozen's if not 100's of groups:

Social networks increase their visibility amongst advertisers
Groups receive compelling, interesting and relevant content that is crafted by their group leader in their own tone of voice
Group leaders feel privileged to be approached by brands to engage their members
Members have the opportunity to engage around content that they are interested in - content that lives in the heart of the conversation and not on the side typically reserved for banner advertisements
The content lives in the groups almost forever and continues generating engagement and clicks
Groups continue to attract new members who often review previous posts
The Social network and the advertiser positively affect their SEO (within 24 hours the SigoJoven is appearing in google search for Los Mejores Aeropuertos de Espana) see results below

Switzerland Tourism also activated their 'free city iphone app' campaign through local Barcelona agency CyberClick. Whilst it's still early days, what we would like to share is how groups crafted the content provided by Switzerland Tourism. The focus of the campaign was to provide free iphone applications to various cities in Switzerland and to support the conversation, 5 conversation sparkers were provided along with supporting information, images and links.

Here is how SigoJoven integrated the campaign into one of their groups reaching 7,500 members:

The results within 24 hours:

137 people visited the story
12 people clicks on the download page

And here is how social network Yumping integrated the campaign with a completely different approach:

We still aren't ready to go prime time yet and our reach is limited to Spain and latin America with some groups in other parts of the world, however if you would like a demo of the Linqia platform please contact us or simply request an invitation.

The darker side of influencer marketing

2010-12-07T12:27:00.006+01:00

The Joneses movie with Demi Moore and David Duchovny is a shocking portrayal of the extent brands will go to influence and manipulate unsuspecting people into buying their products.

The Joneses portrays a fake picture perfect family where each member of the 'unit' is super cool, attractive and aspirational to others. The family relocates to a strategically important suburb (as identified by the company representing the brands) and slowly start to infiltrate its core society. They target the most influential and vulnerable people who are 'suckers for keeping up with the Joneses' - monitoring the increase of sales through an online dashboard. It's fake. It's a game.

The questions is. Do brands deploy these tactics in real life? The simple answer is yes. For decades, famous sports people, movie stars, news anchors and professionals have received sponsorships paid in cash and/or free products to be seen and talked about. Sitcoms, documentaries and movies are laden with product placements. Essentially people and spaces that attract attention have been interfered with commercial influences.

Today, there's a plethora of word-of-mouth and viral platforms/ applications targeting influential consumers who may not necessarily be celebrities but have significant followings on their twitter, blog and social networking profiles.

Is it wrong to influence people for commercial gain? Only when the intention is to deceive or hide the underlying motivations - such as in the case of the Joneses which has you cringing throughout the film in the lead up to when their disguise is eventually unveiled. It's at this point that the community or individuals become bitter, cheated and angry.

The reality of the matter is that friends don't like to be sold too or influenced in an inauthentic way. There must exist transparency so people at least have a choice to engage or not - such as the case with the neighbor selling beauty products.

JOB: Advertising Account Executive at Linqia to start January 2011

2010-12-03T16:03:00.008+01:00

Linqia, an exciting and promising start-up based in Barcelona, recently launched their social advertising platform www.linqia.com which helps advertisers identify, connect and engage with online groups across multiple social networks.

Currently, as there is no such platform existing on the web, Linqia has a significant opportunity to establish its game changing platform as the market leader in the social media arena.

Linqia forms relationships with social networks such as yahoo, myspace, facebook, LinkedIN, XING who have active groups or communities on their platforms and advertisers who have social media advertising budgets.

You would be responsible for creating new relationships that drive revenue growth on a profitable basis.

POSITION OVERVIEW

As an Account Executive you would be primarily responsible for establishing partnerships with advertisers in the Spanish market with the following primary duties:

Advertising Sales: Identifying, prospecting, and forming monetization relationships with various types of advertisers and online related entities, including brands, traditional agencies, social media agencies, direct marketers, email marketers, market researchers, public relations firms, marketing firms or any company that is looking to engage with consumers in the social web.
Growing New and Existing Relationships: Educating and selling prospects or customers on innovative, incremental, and/or emergent forms of community engagement/ social media campaigns. The position requires the ability to achieve specific monthly and quarterly revenue goals as well as maintaining active client relationships.
Additional duties may include representing Linqia at industry conferences and other duties that may be required.

CANDIDATE OVERVIEW
The successful candidate will be an inspiring, confident, hands-on professional with at least:

At least two (2) years business to business sales experience
At least one (1) year of online ad sales or Internet related business development experience (established Rolodex in Barcelona/ Madrid preferred)
Social media experience
Must have effective telephone presentation skills, excellent written communication skills, and a proven ability to close deals.
Fluent in Castellano and English. Catalan is preferred but not a must

The successful candidate will also demonstrate the following abilities:

Intelligence: Acquires understanding and absorbs new information quickly and is motivated to learn.

Customer Focus: Provides satisfaction for both internal and external customers and creates partner relationships.

Entrepreneurial: Resourceful, figure-it-out-and-get-it-done mentality, and a track record of creating successful relationships.

Passion to win: Thrives in a competitive environment, does what it takes to be THE market leader.

Passion for Technology: The ability to present cutting edge technology solutions to prospective partners looking to optimize their revenue.

BENEFITS

Base remuneration + bonus
Fast growing and exciting company with incredible potential: be one of the founding team members and surrounded by experts in social media
International team (Italian, Australian, New Zealand, British, South African, German, Spanish)
Opportunity to work internationally
Values based culture – strong ethics and high level of integrity
Flexible working hours
Casual work environment – No Dress Code

If you would like to be considered for an opportunity with Linqia, please submit your interest via the Linqia website TODAY!

Linqia's new Social Advertising Platform launches

2010-12-01T18:34:00.009+01:00

Late one evening a few weeks back, we re-launched Linqia - an entirely new platform that we've been working on for the past 14 months. Actually, some of us have been working our entire professional lives to make Linqia a reality.

The best way to describe Linqia in a few words is to call it a social advertising platform.

We actually dislike the word advertising in the context of the social web, because as a stand alone word, people who engage in social networks pay very little attention to advertising and in most cases it's quite obtrusive and unwelcome.

The challenge though, is that advertisers and marketers have over $600 billion to spend every year to reach and influence people to do or think something. In parallel, 23% of the time that people spend online is within social networks. Social networks have gobbled up the vast majority of people's attention away from television, newspapers, radio, cinema and even searching on google.

Traditional advertising does not work in social networks. Full stop. What works is adding value to existing conversations and interactions with highly engaging content that people can talk about, recreate, ponder over and share.

We've reached the era where advertising has become social. And when done well the 'advertiser' achieves their initial objective of influencing people to do or think something. Sometimes far more effectively than they could ever have imagined.

The Linqia Platform

Linqia helps advertisers - really any marketer, to identify, connect and engage with online groups across many social networks. What makes Linqia unique is the exclusive focus on the leaders, moderators or administrators of online communities and groups.

For the very first time, advertisers will be able to engage with 100's of groups across partnering social networks reaching 1,000's of highly targeted people AND track and monitor the performance of their engagement campaigns. Creating an engagement campaign takes 5-10 minutes and with very little downside, the advertiser pays only on performance.

When group leaders believe a brand's message resonates with their members, not only will they share their content, but they will adjust it to the natural, trusted language and tone of their group making it even more powerful.

An equitable, transparency model

Advertisers benefit by reaching largely an untapped, highly targeted audience engaging in groups across many social networks.

Social networks benefit by earning most of the revenues paid by advertisers to connect and engage with groups on their platforms.

Group leaders benefit by gaining attention, valuable content and incentives offered by advertisers.

Group members benefit by engaging in highly relevant and interesting content filtered by their group leader.

We're inviting partners to register. Do you meet the following criteria?

Advertisers
Linqia will accept registrations from advertisers and agencies who meet the following criteria:
• Proven experience with social media or online community outreach
• Access to engaging content offerings (videos, images, links, information, etc)
• Access to community managers
Request invite

Social Networks
Linqia will accept registrations from social networks who meet the following criteria:
• Languages using the latin alphabet (current)
• Minimum of 50,000 members
• Minimum of 100 active moderated groups (preferably member-led)
• Minimum of 50 members
• At least 5 posts per week
• Social networks with sexually explicit, violent and illegal content or groups with high level of visible spam are not welcome to the Linqia platform
Request invite

Groups
Linqia will accept registrations from groups who meet the following criteria:
• Hosted on a partnering Social Network
• Active moderation
• Minimum of 50 members
• At least 5 posts per week
Request invite

We're in beta
Which means things could break. It also means that we're limiting access to the platform right now. You'll need to register to receive an email invite from us (please be patient, it might not be straight away).

SEO budgets to increase by 20% on social sites: is this an opportunity for brands to finally engage?

2010-11-27T20:11:00.005+01:00

Covario estimates many advertisers would be spending 10% to 20% of their pay-per-click budgets on Facebook next year, giving the social networking site a major share of that market.

According to Nielsen, web users devoted 23% of their time online to social networking sites this past year, which is forcing advertisers to shift their advertising spend to social networks.

So if web users are spending 23% of their time in social networking sites, do they really want to be advertised to with Facebook ads? Surely there must be more effective ways for advertisers to spend their dollars that gives them a bigger bang for their buck.

The simple fact is, people are engaging with their friends, around content and 'participating' in social activities. Their precious attention becomes immune to advertisements intended to lure them into buying a product or service.

If advertisers are looking to increase their SEO effectiveness, they need to figure out ways to become part of the conversation - which ranks much higher than any advertisement temporarily living in the sidelines of premium social real estate. Search for any topic and the chances are, you'll find a conversation thread in a forum or a blog post.

Community Engagement Campaign Interview: Astaro

2010-11-15T19:44:00.007+01:00

Astaro is a leading global IT security vendor with headquarters in Germany and the US, targeting small and medium-sized businesses. With the launch of their Mail Archiving product, Astaro initiated an engagement campaign within online groups reaching 1,000’s of IT administrators and professionals. Partnering with Linqia, Astaro conducted a 3-month community engagement campaign within two groups on leading Business Social Networks; LinkedIn and Xing.

Astaro’s main objective was to spark a series of conversations around the importance of mail archiving also increasing their brand awareness. In parallel, Astaro was interested in gaining deeper insights and views amongst IT professionals. By tapping into existing user communities online, Astaro was able to better understand user needs, increase awareness and uptake of the mail archiving product.

We interviewed Claudia Seeger, Eric Bégoc, Kathrin Möschle from Astaro to share their key learning's and insights into the 3 month community engagement campaign.

How does Astaro engage with existing customers through social channels?

Very often we use twitter and facebook to report about an event with live comments, pictures etc.

We also try to engage with our customers and partners through online communities such as our User Bulletin Board (for community support) or our feature request portal where users can vote for new features.

This summer we initiated the Orange Summer Campaign as a photo contest asking participants to upload and vote for pictures complimented by our own photo gallery.

How does social media benefit Astaro as a brand?
Social media is an additional channel to increase Astaro's brand awareness. We have the opportunity to reach potential customers or partners we probably wouldn’t reach through traditional channels.

Who participates in social media activities within your organization?
In Europe, the Marketing & PR team engage in social media campaigns. The support team also follows the User Bulletin Board while Product Management tracks the voting results in the Feature Request Portal.

In the US, we have a dedicated community development manager who is responsible for social media activities of all kinds with strong focus on community events.

What motivated Astaro to participate in this engagement campaign with Linqia?
The opportunity to create brand awareness, gain insights from the market, actively generate leads and create a blueprint for future community engagement campaigns.

Which factors were important to Astaro when choosing target groups for this engagement campaign?

IT topics discussed within the group
Group size
Group activity

What were your biggest concerns, regarding the seeding of Astaro’s content within selected groups?
It is always unclear how a community will react and how discussions will develop. It was especially difficult to start a discussion with a question which motivated members to comment without disqualifying our expert status.

Describe in a few sentences your relationship with the group leaders you were engaging with
The relationship was very positive. Both group leaders were attentive, supportive and quick to respond. Especially the leader within the Xing group gave very good feedback on the formulation of posts, possible content and also engaged his co-moderator to spark discussions. He continuously came up with ideas on how to promote our campaign.

What was positive/negative regarding the workflow with the group leaders?
The workflow was good as both group leaders usually responded quickly. Deadlines were not always kept as promised but it never lead to major delays.

How did group members respond to you as brand representative?
Most members did not realize that I was a brand representative. I never experienced any bad reactions – some were critical but always fact based.

How did group members in general respond to the campaign?
Xing members actively engaged in our discussions and posted many comments. LinkedIn members however are a bit more reserved, showing a rather consuming nature and not commenting very much. We had some whitepaper downloads which proved that our posts were read and appreciated.

What did you find challenging during the campaign?
It was a challenge to discuss on very technical topics with very experienced IT experts. Xing members engaging in topic already had a broad knowledge and wanted to position themselves as experts.

With the lack of response within LinkedIn it was very difficult to measure whether members didn’t react because they a) were not interested in the topic, b) didn’t like the style of our postings or c) just didn’t want to engage actively. A very open question on LinkedIn stimulated some feedback but respondents did not take mail archiving into account.

What surprised you the most?
The huge response within the Xing community.

What are your top 5 best practices to engage group members from the standpoint of a brand?

Prepare several topics you would like to discuss in advance. However be aware that you are the expert – don’t ask questions you should be able to answer yourself. Better not engage with the group if you don’t have the right content.
Best if you know one or two community members (not colleagues as the company name is always indicated!) who could start or comment on a discussion
Prepare additional trackable content adding value to your discussions
Don’t hesitate to interrupt lengthy or off-topic discussions and regularly engage with the discussion: ask questions, provide more detailed information or best practices of your customer
Try to summarize results (even during discussions) for new “followers” and those members who only read through threads without actively commenting

From a scale 1-10. How effective was this campaign, compared to general social media marketing activities like using, twitter, facebook, youtube etc., to seed content.
My rating is based on this assumption: 1= much worse, 5= equal, 10= much better than other social media activities:

Xing: 10
LinkedIn: 3

And where do you see the differences?

Twitter and Facebook: we use both channels for giving Astaro a “human face”. We publish pictures of our barbecue event, orange summer voting campaign, industry-related topics or blog posts
YouTube: is the platform to host and share videos we can link to from other social media channels.

What was your biggest key learning from this pilot?
A community campaign can work and even generate leads – as long as you choose the right community.

Would you consider another engagement campaign in near future and why/why not?
Yes, because our experiences with the Xing community were very positive and as we now have a clear blueprint, content to support the engagement and topics to discuss it is easy to reproduce the campaign within other communities.

Engaging Groups: Going Gaga for Transparency

2010-10-19T13:45:00.007+02:00

The key for any advertiser getting started in a group campaign is to acknowledge that they don’t know what they don’t know. Advertisers don’t know groups.

Sure they’ve spent a fortune on garnering demographics and compiling an impressive stack of statistics, but numbers alone don’t reveal the nuances of individual experience and they can’t accurately predict how a group will react to their advertising content.

To begin to really understand what motivates an individual to contribute to group discussion, advertisers must turn to the Group Leader.The Group Leader better than anyone else can reveal a long history of engagement.

Advertisers must learn to appreciate what a unique vantage point the Group Leader has. He (or she) can anticipate what his members will like, dislike, be passionate about or even revolt against.

He knows what kind of content gets the most clicks, what discussions are most likely to generate heat or cause infectious laughter, spirited debate, thoughtfulness, creativity, insight, empathy or knowledge.

Group Leaders have bought together hundreds and thousands of people; all bought together by common interest, cause or experience. Usually the Group Leader themselves shares this in common.

For example, the Group Leader of a weight-loss community may well have undergone a personal weight-loss journey of their own and created a community to share and encourage others on the same journey.

Sharing with a group is often cathartic. Groups offer a sense of camaraderie and the opportunity to genuinely connect. Therefore the most active, vibrant groups are bound together by trust and openness, and more often than not, it’s the Group Leader that leads by example.

So how does a Group Leader introduce an advertiser into his or her group?

He needs to continue to communicate openly with his group. Any pending advertising campaign must be made transparent. The advertising campaign might be a product trial, a competition entry or simply a question to answer.

Therefore the Group Leader may post an introduction on the community noticeboard or the community blog. They might send out a direct email invitation to participate or inform group members.

What language they use; what tone they set is entirely up to them. They communicate with their members, day in day out. They know what to say and how to say it.

Typically clear and concise is best. For example:

“I’d like to welcome [Advertiser X] to our community.

[Advertiser X] will be running a social media content campaign within our group for the next month. What is a social media content campaign? Well, [Advertiser X] would like us to contribute to their campaign. They would appreciate it if we could ...”

Advertisers might ask group members to trial a product; answer a question; share knowledge; provide feedback or apply creativity. The Group Leader may then elaborate and sign off with something like the following, for example;

“[Advertiser X] has offered us an assortment of content to download into the group. You may wish to view, comment, share, like, dislike, reject or embrace. It’s entirely up to you. I’ll be on hand to hear your thoughts. Get in touch.”

The message is simple and to the point. Of course the anticipated upshot of a social media content campaign is to encourage or entrench advertiser-consumer relationships.

Branded content is distributed into online groups to spark conversation-led advertising campaigns. However unlike traditional advertising, conversation-led campaigns welcome the entire spectrum of consumer reactions.

The Group Leader downloads whatever content he feels will add the most value to his community and at what time and where within the site they feel it’s best suited. The Group Leader needs to provide a specific place to post reactions and garner activity around content.

For example, if the first piece of content prompt a good number of posts, the Group Leader may suggest it’s best to let the conversation continue rather than to try and “hijack” attention to another piece of content.

But what happens when an advertiser wishes to participate in group conversation?

Again the key is transparency. Beyond speaking with the Group Leader to understand what tone and language they might use to post comments and ask questions, it’s also a good idea for the advertiser to spend some time in the community beforehand.

Spending time in the community, observing the tone and nature of the conversation is a practical start to any social media campaign.

If an advertiser doesn’t possess the expertise to post on a particular subject, then the advertiser shouldn’t position themselves as an expert. Group members will inevitably see right through it and consequently they may feel deceived.

Better to bring in experts or pool employee resources to answer specialised questions rather than try and position themselves as an expert.

Finally the advertiser needs to collaborate with the Group Leader and listen to what group members have to say. Ultimately, everyone involved in an online group endeavour to foster the natural ebb and flow of human engagement.

Five ways brands click with communities of people online

2010-07-25T18:07:00.001+02:00

If two people meet spontaneously in the street and later get married, an entrepreneur presents in front of a panel of venture capitals and gets funded or an unhappy employee bumps into a former colleague and they start a business together, then this is because they click. It’s powerful and life changing.

It’s Sunday afternoon, very hot outside and instead of listening to my Ibiza landing collection on Spotify, I decide to walk up the mountain at the back of Barcelona, and start listening to Andrew Warners mixergy interviews I downloaded earlier. I select Ori Brafman’s interview How To Click With People as the first cab of the rank. As I listen to the interview, I think about how the guiding principals of people clicking with one another also apply to how brands click with communities of people online.

So is it really possible for brands to click with communities of people?

Before I attempt to answer this question, we need to shift our mindset from perceiving brands as we have perceived them prior to Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. In the context of social media, brands are people. If a brand reaches out to a community, they do so as a person – not a logo, an advertisement or a robot.

There five specific factors that create the dynamic for people to click:

1. Vulnerability

2. Proximity

3. Resonance

4. Similarity

5. Safe place

Vulnerability is opening up about topics that capture people’s attention and ultimately empathy. To the point when you demonstrate vulnerability people reciprocate and open up. It’s not always about appearing strong and in control. For example, with BP’s recent oil spill this has made them totally vulnerable. As part of their community outreach, acknowledging the severity of the disaster and how much they are hurting creates a bridge for the community to reciprocate and share stories about how much they are hurting too.

Proximity is about being close to your community. There was a study at an MIT dorm, and it was a series of dorms that were all on a line just like a motel. What they found out was that the people who had formed the most connections were the people who actually lived in the central dorms as opposed to those who lived at the edge of the dorm where you are a little bit out of traffic. How can this be applied to a brand? If a brand is consistently present and collaborating with important communities, people will start liking you more and just by multiple exposures they are also going to like you better.

Resonance is about being present and flow. Brands who show up, ask questions, express genuine interest have a higher resonance factor than those who don’t. How can a brand experience flow? Flow is about being in the moment and being so engaged that they find themselves being truly alive, truly part of the community and connected to their surroundings.

Similarity is about finding points of similar interest and discovering you share these. What matters most is the quantity of similar things. It takes about seven or eight similarities for people to start viewing each other as better human beings, as smarter, as more moral, more like us. This has been hard wired in us for 1,000’s of years and it isn’t going to change any time soon.

Safe place is the final click accelerator and it means to have a clearly defined community. Context is a critical factor for how people feel about each other and that taps into the notion of ‘we are in it together’. So an example would be a community of people engaging around the world cup. If they’re Spaniards who recently won the world cup, a brand would enter the community sharing stories about how they where there too perhaps sharing photos or videos from the celebrations that took place afterwards.

The purpose of a brand within any social channel is to build relationships. These five factors are key to the speed at which a brand can build these relationship and how the relationships will develop.

Ori Brafman is the bestselling author of Sway, Starfish and the Spider and now Click: The Magic of Instant Connections.

27.8% of time spent online is in online communities. Virgin territory for brands?

2010-05-17T20:30:00.007+02:00

From the 1.7 billion people online, 4.4% of time is spent searching and 27.8% is spent in online communities. What's astonishing about these figures, is that where people spend time online, with the exception of online communities, is decreasing rapidly. And yet, the billions of advertising dollars are injected into search.

Mark Zuckerberg put his finger on it. He recently said "Communities already exist. Instead, think about how you can help that community do what it wants to do."

So what exactly does a community want to do? Simple. Every community wants to maximise the quality of experience of as many members as possible. This could be achieved through vibrant, active discussions, compelling and engaging content, sponsorships and partnerships with access to exclusive offerings, opportunities to get to know other members. The list goes on.

Recently at the Lift2010 conference in Geneva, 37 curious people gained insights into how brands can successfully participate in multiple online communities that may not necessarily be their own. This is virgin territory and whilst brands are sold on the concept, they lack the 'how'.

The presentation and video explore:
• Evolution of online communities
• Approaches brands have taken to engage with online communities
• Opportunities and challenges brands face when engaging with online communities

Online Communities: How brands are edging their way into the heart of the conversation

View more presentations from Maria Sipka.

LIFT10 - Brands and Online Communities from netinfluenceChannel on Vimeo.

Thanks to Nicolas Fermont from NetInfluence who whipped this video together in 10 minutes.

How does the new FTC Regulation affect social networks and online communities?

2009-12-08T17:39:00.006+01:00

In summary: What is the FTC regulation all about?
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of the US recently published an updated guide providing "administrative interpretations“ for laws concerning endorsements and testimonials in advertising. For the first time, the guide also specifically mentions social media, particularly bloggers, and what their responsibilities are when endorsing a brand or product online. Basically, anyone who gets paid or otherwise compensated for writing about a product or service, has to disclose this relationship. Claims made by an endorser may not be misleading. This has mainly been discussed for bloggers, but these guidelines should also be adhered to in social networks, microblogging services like Twitter and in online communities, groups and forums.

What’s an endorsement?
According to the FTC, „an endorsement means any advertising message [...] that consumers are likely to believe reflects the opinions, beliefs, findings, or experiences of a party other than the sponsoring advertiser, even if the views expressed by that party are identical to those of the sponsoring advertiser.“

„Endorsements must reflect the honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experience of the endorser. Furthermore, an endorsement may not convey any express or implied representation that would be deceptive if made directly by the advertiser.“

The guide gives an example of a blogger who writes about dog food:

If she just decides to try a new brand, likes it, and writes about it: not an endorsement
If she gets a coupon from her supermarket for a free trial because the store „...routinely tracks her purchases and its computer has generated a coupon for a free trial bag...“ and writes about the food: not an endorsement
If she joins a network marketing program and receives products periodically, receives a free bag of dog food and writes about it: this would be an endorsement.

When is disclosure needed?
„When there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller or the advertised product that might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement (i.e. the connection is not reasonably expected by the audience), such connection must be fully disclosed.“

For example, if a game expert receives a game console for free and reviews it: „Because his review is disseminated via a form of consumer-generated media in which his relationship to the advertiser is not inherently obvious, readers are unlikely to know that he has received the video game system free of charge in exchange for his review of the product, and given the value of the game system, this fact likely would materially affect the credibility they attach to his endorsement. Accordingly, the blogger should clearly and conspicuously disclose that he received the gaming system free of charge. The manufacturer should advise him at the time it provides the gaming system that this connection should be disclosed, and it should have procedures in place to try to monitor his postings for compliance.“

What is the advertiser’s responsibility?
„The advertiser is subject to liability for misleading or unsubstantiated representations made through the blogger’s endorsement“
(Example: If an advertiser asks a blogger to test a body lotion and the blogger writes that the lotion can cure eczema, the advertiser is liable for this misleading claim – even if the advertiser has not made such claims). Advertisers must also make sure that any person that receives incentivization by them discloses this fact when writing or speaking about a product.

How can advertisers ensure compliance?
Advertisers should ensure that anyone who is speaking on their behalf or endorsing them knows about these rules beforehand. They should consider providing their endorsers with guidelines and suggestions on how to disclose the relationships. Additionally, advertisers must monitor for compliance and have the responsibility of halting publication of claims that could be considered deceptive.

What is the endorser’s responsibility?
While it is unlikely that the FTC will go after single bloggers, it states that „the blogger is also subject to liability for misleading or unsubstantiated representations made in the course of her endorsement. The blogger is also liable if she fails to disclose clearly and conspicuously that she is being paid for her services.“

How does this affect brand engagement in social networking services?
Whilst these guidelines have been discussed in relation to bloggers, the guide clearly also targets any other form of social media. An important point is that according to the FTC, consumers might not realize that messages in social networks or on message boards are from paid endorsers. Anyone who has a relationship with a brand or product, whether it be by employment or any kind of payment or incentivization, should therefore disclose their relationship to the advertiser when speaking about this brand.

Employees of a brand can no longer go on message boards and praise their products without informing the community that they are working for this company.

How should disclaimers be made?
Disclaimers should be made „clearly and conspicuously“. There have been discussions about blanket disclaimers that would just appear on one page, for example a blogger’s „About“ page. This will probably not be considered conspicuous enough. To be on the safe side, it is probably best to include a disclaimer within a blog post or discussion post, where any reader can be expected to see it.

What happens if a brand or an endorser does not comply with these guidelines?
Violations – and this concerns the brand as well as the endorser - are punishable by civil penalties of up to $11,000 per violation. That fine is probably a smaller part of the damage though – considering how fast word travels in social media, the damage to a brand or endorser’s image could be much higher than that.

What is Linqia’s view about these guidelines?
We fully support the principals behind these guidelines. We encourage brands to engage in conversations and we believe this should always happen in a transparent and open way. The key driver to engaging successfully in conversations is to be authentic – and this includes disclosing who you are and who you are speaking on behalf. We will be actively encouraging and educating brands we work with to disclose such information and inform endorsers to do the same.

Further Reading

Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising (the original text by the FTC)
http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005revisedendorsementguides.pdf

New FTC Marketing Guidelines – The Five Things You Must Know
http://www.trafficandconversion.com/new-ftc-marketing-guidelines-the-five-things-you-must-know/

You Can Make Everything You Want Come True – With Maria Sipka

2009-10-07T18:07:00.004+02:00

Mid August Jared Goralnick, Productivity Evangelist (and Founder) of Away Find visited me in Barcelona after being introduced by a common friend. After 35 minutes of sharing our stories, sitting in a back street bar in Ravel sipping a fresh juice, he said "I have to introduce you to Andrew Warner from Mixergy!" A month later I had one of the most inspiring interviews of my life.

Andrew asked his audience what the title should be and after listening 60 minutes to a very raw and intimate interview, one listener suggested 'You Can Make Everything You Want Come True - with Maria Sipka'.

Andrew wrote..."What I think is most inspiring about Maria is how she sees a goal and systematically finds a way to achieve it. I'd sum up her approach using a quote that I pulled from the interview: "Who you become depends on the books that you read and the people that you meet."

When she started a marketing consulting company, she gobbled up every book on sales that she could. When she got into real estate, she turned to an investor who was further ahead than she was for advice. As you listen to her story, you'll see how much you can achieve with the right influences."

Creating conversations in the social media space (not just campaigns)

2009-09-30T19:11:00.016+02:00

How does a brand even start their thinking re: creating conversations that make sense in the Social Media space?

Two guys are standing at the water cooler on a Monday morning. Jack needs new training shoes. His Nike trainers are well over their 6 months changeover date. Next to Jack stands Pete, an avid runner, and he’s commenting on how great his third pair of ASICS Kayanos are. He wouldn’t change them for all the Power Bars in New York. Suddenly Stu (a marketer from downstairs) runs into the conversation yelling something about 15% off all BBQs at Wal-Mart for this week only. Stu blinks at them and then stares blankly. He then repeats the 15% offer. Continued silence from Jack and Pete. Jack and Pete keep talking for a while and then leave Stu, who still hasn’t clicked they are not interested.

Sadly, this is how brands have behaved since the invention of the newspaper, television and radio. With the emergence of social media this scenario is slowly changing, the communication structure is flattening and ‘engagement’ is becoming the new metric to ROI.

This post looks at the world of conversational marketing online and asks the question “How does a brand spark relevant conversations online authentically, where the conversations are already happening?” Being a part of conversations that are relevant to a brand increases engagement and interaction with that brand and is the new marketing nirvana that can lead to increased sales. But how do brands achieve this beyond the banner (widget or VDO unit) and into the conversation?

We first need to start with a simple 3 step process where brands 1) listen 2) engage 3) monitor.

Listening & monitoring. It would be hard not to notice the endless hype around twitter, facebook and a host of other platforms. With over 2,000 social networks, 160 million groups and 750 million people globally engaging in some kind of conversation, brands are listening to what is being said about their products, services, competitors and future offerings through monitoring tools (see 20 top buzz monitoring tools).

Engaging means brands for the very first time are experimenting with sparing conversations amongst pockets of interested and diverse groups of people. The results are organic and eye opening for many. Leading brands such as Nestle, Virgin, McDonalds & evening highly controversial tobacco companies have the approach of ‘test and learn’. Traditionally, brands would engage market research firms and spend countless months and extremely high budgets to ask people all sorts of questions. The outcome? Sterile and, in most cases, totally ineffective.

To work through a real example of your brand and see how you would approach a conversation using Social Media, you need to start from a place of knowing who you are ‘Who are you? = Brand’ + ‘What do you stand for = Brand pillars’ (See diagram)

The next step is to expand out into what type of positive conversation you intend to engage in. Think of the types of positive conversations you have day to day. There are many elements to them, and in general, they have one or all of the following broad elements:

1. They make me laugh = Entertain

2. They tell me something I didn’t know before = Inform

3. They open my eyes that little bit more because of the opportunity/possibility they communicate = Inspire

4. They give me an added boost and make me feel good in what I am doing = Encourage and Support

Of course, there are many other elements in conversation, however these are typically negative and do not create a YES + AND conversational space where people want to contribute and grow.

The BIGGEST and best point to keep in mind is this: Picture you are the conversation you want to have and you are at a dinner party with a table of strangers. If you are tasked with engaging the people around the table, how would you normally do this? Before you say ‘I am going to say it like this or offer them this’ think about yourself at the dinner party again and ask ‘What reaction would I likely receive if I was to do/say that in the real world’. Now multiply that reaction by a million (as this is the online world) and then decide if you still want to share/converse as you had planned, or if you will try a different approach.

There are some gems in the 95 Theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto to assist in this thinking process. While we won’t list them all, here are the most relevant to keep in mind as you work through this exercise:

1. Markets are conversations.

2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.

3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

10. As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.

11. People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.

14. Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.

15. In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.

20. Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

21. Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.

34. To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.

38. Human communities are based on discourse—on human speech about human concerns.

And so, what might the outcome look like? Well, taking the above framework in mind, we undertook this approach for a brand you may know, IKEA. The following questions lead us to the diagram below. It is merely one possible outcome, however it ended with a framework of online conversational starters and approaches that would be at least authentic for the brand.

Key questions to ask:

1. Who am I? Your brand. The central point you want to converse about

2. What do stand for? What does your brand have a right to talk about? IKEA and DIY = yes. IKEA and None of your friends will have this = No.

3. How can I share this to...? Choose the type of positive conversation that you want to have. Think about your conversational objectives. Where do you want the person you are conversing with to be because of the conversation? i.e. happier, better informed, inspired, encouraged?

4. What elements do I share to spark and maintain this? The right digital elements to share and support this conversation need to be thought about. It does not necessarily need to be a full blown widget, it could be as simple as a series of images, some text and a link (it is most likely NOT a banner ad though).

5. What would I say to kick this off? What is the ice breaker? What do you say first? How can you start this in a way which is the most engaging and creates the most open space for discourse?

The only thing now is....how do you find and reach into the right spaces online to have this conversations?! That will need to wait until our next post. Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

_______________________________

Linqia works with leading global brands to drive social media marketing results through an online marketplace by connecting brands deep into the conversations of online groups and social networks.

This article was co-authored by Maria Sipka (Founder and CEO of Linqia.com) and Piero Poli (VP of Business Development and Strategy at Linqia.com)

8 Social Networks gather at London's 2nd Round Table on Monetization

2009-09-22T22:13:00.005+02:00

Today we hosted our second social network round table in London at The Hub Culture Pavilion (thanks Stan!) and shared insights from the past 6 months of interviewing 200 social networks.

Insights from 200 Social Networks on Monetization

View more presentations from Maria Sipka.

Together with 8 social networks including Fanshake, Ecademy, StudentBox, The Tuttle Club, Hub Culture, UnLtdWorld and former executive from MySpace, Monster and founder of Sportingo we explored the latest innovative techniques being deployed to monetize social networks and engage members. Highlights were:

Dana Al Salem - CEO and founder of Fanshake, spoke about recently releasing a white labeled version of their platform to enable any company, brand or organization to create a fan clubs. Fanshake has also become a magnet for discount ticket vendors to sell concert tickets at discount or face value prices creating a fair and affordable market for teenagers strapped for cas.
Glenn Watkins - CEO and co-founder of Ecademy shared the power of influencer engagement citing a recent event where Chairman Thomas Powers asked a question of the audience and received 100's of replies via twitter, facebook and his own platform Ecademy.
Carl Edouard Pihl - CEO and founder of StudentBox sees trends moving towards niche communities where broad based communities such as Facebook are not addressing specific needs of groups such as students.
Lloyd Davies - founder of The Tuttle Club has been able to tap into existing event brands such as TedX and host an event and create increased engagement amongst members.

Our host, Stan Stalnaker - CEO and founder of Hub Culture left us awe inspired with his innovative implementation of his virtual currency Ven. Ven is set to create a virtual currency revolution within business communities featuring an incredibly relevant and meaningful value exchange for members and vendors. Asian social networks are leading the virtual currency/ goods way with Tencent reporting a US$1 billion annual turnover - 95% attributed to virtual goods. Hub Culture's Ven has attracted global interest within the last 24 hours after announcing a new contest named The Ven Prize. It will be awarded to “sustainable, circular, cellular economic systems in Hub Culture and the world at large.”

Register your interest for our Munich social network round table in November.

200 Social Networks at Linqia!

2009-09-22T16:13:00.000+02:00

If you shoot for the moon and miss you land amongst the stars. 6 months ago we shot for the moon and today at 18:43 we hit our target exactly welcoming our 200th social network. Who was the 200th social network to register? An Austrian Social Network Uboot.com!!

Over the past 6 months, our team has extensively identified, sought introductions and approached over 300 Social Networks. We've interviewed a vast majority of our registered Social Networks to gain deeper insights into their needs and how we could best serve them. We typically spoke to the founder or business development executive who enthusiastically responded to questions around their business model, what worked, what didn't work and their needs. 95% of all Social Networks expressed a need to attract new members, fulfill on their Business Model (or even create one) and increase engagement amongst registered members.

We'd like to feature 3 Social Network who registered to Linqia today. Our team was beyond excitement leading into the afternoon realizing we could achieve our target of 200. Our supporters twittered like crazy to spread the word which enabled us to increase registrations from 195 networks to 200 within one day!

The lucky #200 is Uboot.com! Uboot is one of Europe’s largest and oldest mobile communities for young people accessing both internet and mobile. With more than 6 million registered members, it’s a meeting point for young people to enjoy conversations and meet online to share photos, videos and more. Marlis Rumler, the CEO, actually shared with us that Uboot.com is one of Europe’s oldest German speaking Social Networks, founded in 1999.

Lucky #199 is MyMusic.de. A German community founded by professional community builders Ekaabo, whose CEO Marco Ripanti is highly active in the community scene with Yiid and Communipedia. MyMusic is Germany's answer to MySpace where members share their passions like music, artists, DJ´s, or dancers, or even going to the same clubs and discos.

Position #3 is proudly held by AgencyScoop. Registered as number 198, its a US based professional network for the advertising industry with over 20,000 members from the creative, account, and production scene. AgencyScoop's CEO Jason Culbertson, having been in the advertising for many years, was able to grow the network exclusively through word of mouth to 20.000 members in six months. It´s a “Must Be“ place for people in advertising to find advice, access opportunities and receive insights to boost their careers.

By mid afternoon, we achieved our target of 200. Our fellow colleague Edwina Dendler with her ever-analytic outlook posted on yammer ... “We now have a marketplace with 200 networks and over 377 million members. Did you realize that we reach more members than Facebook does?“...

Let´s see what the future brings :-)

We're extremely excited for every social network and mega niche community who forms part of the 200! Thank you for your support!

Monetizing Online Groups: A Good Example

2009-07-23T10:18:00.004+02:00

Over the past 3 months, our team has interviewed over 120 social networks and online communities across the globe. The number 1 challenge they're all facing is monetization. Banner ads don't work - CPM rates have plummeted - in some cases from €20 to €2, members aren't paying any attention to ads and there's not enough inventory to service the combined billions of page views across these sites. Sites doing well generate revenue through selling virtual currencies, member subscriptions and integrating partnerships.

Whilst we estimate there exists over 2,000 social networks and online communities, there are over 80 million groups created by members, organizations and companies.

So how do you monetize groups?

Similar to social networks, some platform allow groups to embed advertising - such as Ning. The most common form of monetization is through affiliate links and direct partnerships.

I group I belong to on LinkedIN is the 30,000+ member Social Media Marketing group lead by Michael Crosson. Michael is a LinkedIN member passionate about social media and engaging members in a variety of discussions around this topic. It's the largest group on LinkedIn for this topic and serves a 'go to' place to connect with people interesting in social media marketing and learning more about this.

Michael has been smart and started integrating affiliate partners into his group. With a reach of 30,000+ people, he's able to blast a message to all of his members guaranteeing a high percentage of attention and 'eye balls'. This type of marketing is very different to adsense or embedded affiliate opportunities. Firstly - most if not all of the offers may not be something the members are proactively searching for now - therefor receiving a message from a trusted person addresses people are not searching. Secondly, whilst the group has 30,000+ registered members, they don't necessarily visit the group on a regular basis - meaning that any ads or offers presented won't be seen. The most effective form of distributing any message or offer is through email - from somebody the group members trust and will pay attention to.

Below, you will see the message I received this morning from Michael - which I spent 30 seconds reviewing:

Six key ingredients to effectively presenting opportunities to members in your group:

Source opportunities or offers which are highly relevant to your members. State why the opportunity is interesting.
The message must not be scripted or written in a commercial way. Write like you're sitting around a table with your members and sharing something exciting you came across that would be relevant to them.
Be transparent. If you're receiving a commission or kickback - make this obvious
Your message should not only be commercial in nature. Deliver some value at the beginning of the message - sharing some news, an article or something interesting. Append commercial opportunities or partners at the end of your message.
Plan the frequency of how often you will communicate with your members. Depending on the affinity you have developed with your members, if you send too many messages you will start to loose their interest. A very close knit group
Track how many people click on the links. For larger groups (1,000+) ideally you want 10% of members clicking on the links. For smaller groups 20% is healthy and indicative that you're delivering value.

What not to do:

Make it obvious that it's an affiliate link - Michael has included the link in it's entirety including his affiliate code. I would suggest that you shortern or disguise the URL. Whilst it's important to disclose that the links are commercial in nature you can avoid posting lengthy URL's

There are 100's of affiliate programs you can access. Many groups have embedded the Amazon affiliate program, LinkShare, commission junction, tradedoubler, adjug, adroll and so on.

It's worth testing and even speaking to members within your group to find the right balance.

Linqia Nominated for TechCrunch awards

2009-06-26T18:13:00.003+02:00

To our surprise this morning - after receiving an email from one of our partnering social networks SliceThePie - Linqia has been nominated for a TechCrunch award.

It took some time to dig through each of the categories to finally find our nomination. We're thrilled to be in the category The Europas: Best Startup Founder(s) (EMEA).

Please vote for us!

Taking Esther Dyson to The Moon and Back...

2009-06-06T12:39:00.006+02:00

As entrepreneurs we do things for different reasons. We're motivated primarily by our own dreams and with that momentum and passion we create a tail wind for others to join. Esther Dyson (pictured on right), an impassioned business angel, has a tremendous tail wind which 1,000's of people have joined. Being extremely humbled natured and unassuming, this lady is a rock star in her own right.

This week, Esther invited me to attend a fabulous NextWomen event organized by Simone Brummelhuis (pictured on left). An avalanche of attendees pounced on Esther as she arrived and sang her high praises thanking her for everything she has contributed to the technology space over the decades - in particular her impact on women in technology.

I would guess that Esther meets at least 20-100 people every day so over 20 years that's a lot of people to remember! Because she has impacted so many of these people when they cross her path it's like meeting a long lost friend. Most of the time Esther has no clue who they are and in a sheepish tone says 'please excuse me but who are you?'.

The first thing that amused me about Esther when we first met on a rainy afternoon in Barcelona back in March 2008 - was that her feet were sore from walking, we were drenched from the spring rain and she gave me approx 25 minutes to inspire her to investing into our company Linqia. With time running thin and no suitable cafe in sight, I whisked her into the foyer of a wanna be 4 star hotel, she placed her backpack to the side of the club lounge and swung her knees over the arms of the chair asking me 'so what are you all about?'. As I shared the purpose and reason why I started Linqia, she took out her camera and started taking photos. It felt awkward but this is how Esther Dyson remembers people and if they have a story to tell she'll anchor it to the photo. Otherwise it's just another face in her flickr stream.

Following the event in London, we again went in search of a place to sit and eat. "I'd prefer to sit somewhere quiet... non of these noisy pubs if we can avoid them". We found a nice Italian restaurant in Covent Gardens. She ordered Tomato soup and I ordered Spinach soup. When both bowls came out she wanted to taste mine and thought it would have been a good idea for the kitchen to mix the two. The green soup drizzled onto her red soup and it kind of looked artistic. These are the little moments you remember when you fondly think about an encounter with someone like Esther. It's not about the hard core business to be done and who can do what for each other. I've come to adore this lady for who she is and can comfortable proclaim that she's the Mother Theresa to entrepreneurs.

Here's my second dream (Linqia's social vision is my first). To enable Esther Dyson to fly to the moon and back.

With the reasonable investment Esther Dyson has entrusted in our company I would like to think that when the moment arrives to return this investment it's enough for a ticket to the moon and back. Esther has just completed a 6 month stint at Star City, Russia now proudly a fully trained cosmonaut. This type of training doesn't come cheap. At US$3 million it's either for the super rich or the hard core enthusiast. For Esther it was the later, driven by her desire to conquer her own reaction to the Russian system and survive it. She likened it to climbing Mount Everst. It was one of the proudest moments in her life to become a certified Cosmonaut.

I asked her - "so when do you fly to the moon?" and she told me it wasn't so simple. She'd need US$40 million to do so. My eyes opened widely and my response "We better speed things up with Linqia then".

Roundtable with 5 UK Social Networks: Monetization, Content & Engagement

2009-06-05T17:29:00.006+02:00

Every social network - even Facebook - are experiencing the same challenges. The key questions are 1) how do we monetize our membership base 2) how do we increase engagement 3) how do we attract quality content. If you were to prioritize the three you would focus on attracting quality content which would increase engagement and ultimately lead to monetization.

To date, 53 social networking platforms reaching over 42 million members have registered to the Linqia Marketplace. It's not so easy to register to the Marketplace - certainly not a 1 minute process, and we deliberately kept it this way. If we're to help crack this monetization nut and drive value into social networks we need to understand what they need and how to deliver this value to them. We speak to each social networking platform who registers for at least 30 minutes to an hour. But it's quite not the same as exposing these valuable conversations in real life around a table with a handful of people who are have similar stories and challenges to share.

So we decided to make a step in the right direction and start a series of roundtable inviting social networks to gather and openly discuss with each other. This week we were in London. Almost all social networks we approached enthusiastically accepted our invitation.

Katrin Janssen and Clare Rees from Second Life (Linden Labs)
Ze'ev Rozov from Sportingo
David Langer from GroupSpaces
David Courtier-Dutton & Grace Hammond from SliceThePie

Thanks also to Jonathan from VitalFootballUK who I spoke to over the phone and Chris Seth from Piczo & Stardoll for lunch. These guys contributed significantly to the conversation.

Monetization
Social Networks monetize through traditional banner advertising, google adwords, sponsorships, premium membership, premium features, content integrations (music, video, stills & editorial) & virtual goods.

Katrin shared how Second Life generates healthy revenues from selling land and virtual goods - although virtual goods are not where significant profits exist as most of the transaction value is distributed amongst members. Second Life has sold land equivalent to the size of Sweden.

Challenges
CPM rates have dropped significantly - on average to 20-30 cents per 1,000 impressions. Members of social networks generally don't pay attention to advertisements as they are focusing on interacting with other members and building their profiles. Social Networks have shifted their business development attention to attracting high value sponsors and integrating branded campaigns. Big spenders are Disney, Bacardi, Nike, RedBull, Cisco to name a few.

But what about the smaller brands and content producers? Well, the key insight is in the complexity to integrate. Many relationships are handled through expensive account managers where human contact cannot be avoided - the process isn't automated. Whilst times are tough, a Social Network may dedicate resources into an opportunity that's worth €2,000, the larger Social Networks tend to invest into campaigns/ sponsorships worth €50,000+.

And on the other side we have niche Social Networks who are too small for the big brands with the big budgets to pay any attention to them. They miss out on vital funding and potentially compelling content to drive engagement because it's not worth the time for the brands to develop these smaller relationships. The brands want to deal with the bigger Social Networks with millions of members.

Content
We're experiencing a tipping point with 1,000's of developers , brands, agencies and individuals generating compelling content bringing opportunities to monetize directly and indirectly. Whilst content is king - attention rules in the equation. Social Networks are investing heavily into developing their platforms to enable easy, automated content integration as well as establishing relationships with content providers. The types of content which are appealing to various audiences include videos, competitions, games, polls, jobs, offers, virtual goods and music. Product quality content, embed engaging offers or advertising and response rates increase significantly - after all - advertising works where the eye balls stick.

Engagement
Total number of members in a social network mean nothing if the members don't return often or at all. There's probably a good reason why a person has invested the few minutes or more to register to a Social Networking platform - particularily today where there are infinate choices where to hang out on line. In addition to a great usability - user experience is most important and finding ways to entertain and stimulate engagement is a big challenge for social networks. Whilst there's loads of content available, sourcing targeted, appropriate content is difficult. Second Life have attracted a dedicated, passionate group of community gateway leaders who act as a concierge to all new members. The gateways are geographic as well as interest based.

GroupSpaces has a significant upside through building their social networking platform from existing off-line communities who needed an online presence. It's widely known that if you can engage members to meet off-line then the social network is far more valuable.

Conclusions
I was surprised to hear that Social Networks were keen to find ways to cross promote and cross polinate offers. For example, bands on SliceThePie could easily promote their music and events in Second Life.

Looking into the future, syndicating value sources and enabling distribution of user generated content, profiles, friendships, paid content from large and small producers is commonly shared amongst the participants of our roundtable. Social Networks who offer more than a generic social networking experience and focus on their niche - whether it be hosting your second life, being a football enthusiast, a rock band looking for a record deal, a colleague or a teenager developing who they are will continue to thrive.

___________________________

Future roundtables will be held in London at Hub Culture, Barcelona, Madrid & Hamburg. If you are interested in attending please contact us.

Linqia Social Network Marketplace: Release 2

2009-05-21T14:18:00.008+02:00

After speaking with over 30 social networks in the last four weeks, we incorporated feedback and released an improved version of Linqia's Social Network Marketplace. Thanks for your valuable comments and suggestions. We're listening and iterating fast!

What's new?

Homepage
Our visitors wanted to see how many social networks had already registered.

You'll now see:

The number of social networks, reach to members & countries
A scrolling bar of registered social networks
A much better login tool

We're proud to report that during the last 3 weeks 37 Social Networks (e.g. XING, Ecademy, PinkSofa, Twidox, Sportingo) from 28 countries have signed up to the marketplace. In total they are reaching more than 35 million members.

Usability
Further we've improved the usability of the site:

For our commercial partners we've integrated a new filtering system to select relevant Social Networks.
For social networks, all information is captured during their sign-up to ensure we don't miss any important criterias

Coming up

Any visitor will be able to see detailed information of all registered Social Networks
Improved registration process for Social Networks to better select Countries & Categories
Featured Commercial Partners in the Social Network's opportunity inbox
General usability & design

Have your say!
If you have any further feedback or comments you would like to share with us, please reach out. We are eager to develop the marketplace according to your needs.

Bold, Courageous & Outright Fun! How P&G Immersed 200 Executives in a Powerful Social Media Experience

2009-05-15T17:21:00.005+02:00

They called it 'Digital Night' and the gathering happened Tuesday evening at the Proctor & Gamble headquarters in Geneva. Our primary mission was to raise £25,000 for saving babies from Tetanus under the UNICEF initiave by 2pm the following day using any social media channel or tool. The secondary mission was immerse executives into the digital world.

200 executives flew in from all parts of Europe - England, Germany, Spain, Portugal... along with 50 digital and social media experts from MySpace, Google, WPP, LABEL and a host of other companies we're invited to help with the extravaganza.

Absolutely mind blowing! Bold! Courageous! Incredible experience I've encountered to date.

Here's what happened.

I arrived with my colleague John Horniblow from the LABEL team (see John's blog post) - an agency based out of Geneva after being invited by Filippo Catalano from Proctor & Gamble. To be honest - I thought it was a gala ball so I kind of dressed up in a fancy dress and dusted off my makeup to 'blend' into the crowd. To my surprise it was a bunch of curious and enthusiastic people dressed in suits with laptop in hand and mobile phone in the other.

A pre-briefing session attempted to induct us into what we were about to experience over the next three hours. It was a tad confusing - which I believe was intentional - and promised to be fun and educational. The lights went out, a man with a funny hat appeared on stage with a Brazilian accent and held a technical gadget in his hand beaming it into the crowd. I had to chuckle when it didn't work and he managed to bridge to the next presenter without loosing his spirit.

We were seperated into four teams - each themed with a Pampers product. I followed John into the 'New Baby' room and sat at a table in the back. Our leader explained in greater detail what our next steps where, what the screen behind him represented and what tools we could use. He then prompted the room to start brainstorming how we would approach our mission to raise £25,000.

Wow! We are about to create as much buzz as 250 well connected and creative people can achieve in a little over 2 hours. How exciting!

"why don't we reach out to really rich people we all know!" said one participant..." what about convincing high traffic news sites to feature a link to the campaign" and another "what if we optimize existing sites to drive more traffic to the fund raising site" and "what if we reach influencers on Twitter?" and "how about creating a video and uploading it to YouTube?"....we had so many ideas within 8 minutes.

The leader was smart. He threw suggestions back to the room and asked how we should go about executing on our ideas. But first he said "we have to put our money where our mouth is... start by making a donation yourself"

Our strategy entailed each table to work on the following:

The big fish - reaching rich people
The influencers - reaching influencial people via Twitter and Facebook
Content creators - creating blogs, groups, videos and themes
SEO - optimizing existing sites
Media buyers - approaching high traffic websites to feature our links

And so we started.

The lady sitting next to met didn't know what Twitter was and had a Facebook account although wasn't very active boasting 15 friends. I suggested she download the Facebook application for justgiving.org - which was the hosting platform for donations, and invite her friends to participate. She also identified a number of groups relating to the topic of Tetanus and asked the group admins to spread the word.

I ran a little experiment myself. My idea was to use SocialToo to send a message to each of my Twitter followers and inspire them to RT the key message + link. My only challenge was - I didn't bring my laptop and didn't have my password! Rats! So my second idea was to reach out to the most influential people in my Twitter community and send them a message directly. This worked! Big time! 7 out of 10 requests Retweeted my post and many more retweeted their posts representing exposure to over 100,000 people. Thanks to each of you! You're true champions.

Every time something exciting happened, the leader announced it to the team.

"We just scored 100 million page impressions... take a look! we're on the T-mobile and Bilt sites in Germany!"

"Prominent tech blogger @mikebutcher tweets!"

"Salma Hayek just donated £500 pounds!"

"Join the group we just created on Facebook"

"Tweet about the blog we just created"

"Vote on the video we just uploaded to YouTube"

and so on....

Everybody was awe inspired, excited, tapping away at their keyboards, calling friends. One P&G executive received 4 emails from other participants asking him to donate money! One colleague was giving away tickets to the Blue Man Show for the person who donated the most money from his network.

By the end of the evening we had raised £2,650 and collectively with the other teams over £10,000. We created so much buzz appearing on the Twitter Trend Topics.

To sum up the evening, the key takeaways were:

Create a social media event within your company to raise awareness and a real life experience around social media
Incorporate a powerful story or drawcard that gives people a reason to spread the message
Provide some basic guidelines around do's and don'ts so participants don't go completely crazy
Invite experts to participate and help those who have little experience around the tools they could use
Offer real time reporting about the progress of the event, what people are doing that's working & celebrating success

You'll notice that one of my followers responded with a slightly negative comment:

Soph@mariasipka sad world. P&G gets more publicity by not pay 25k by themself, instead they make a social media campaign and let others pay.

My response to Soph:

@Soph It's actually a fascinating initiative to educate P&G execs about giving up control & adopting sound social media practices. Amazing!

This is perfectly OK! Everybody has their own opinion and you'll never have everybody on the same page.

Collaborative Communities at Next09

2009-05-08T12:06:00.005+02:00

Our team attended the Next09 conference in Hamburg this week and rate this event as amongst the best in Europe. With over 1,300 participants, 100+ speakers and moderators and a host of innovative sponsors and partners, the event exceeded our expectations.

We were invited to present to a group of more than 200 people on the topic of 'Collaborative Communities' focusing on the role of an online community within the sales process/ cycle of a company. One of Linqia's key missions is to increase the % of vibrant, active and engaging online communities drawing on the wealth of knowledge and experience our team has accumulated over many years.

Collaborative Communities by Maria Sipka

View more presentations from mariasipka.

Following the presentation, feedback and comments again proved that companies are still in the early days of exploring the possibility of integrating social media and online communities. There's uncertainty around where to start, what type of resources are needed internally and externally, the cost to setup and manage, which technologies to use and how to deal with the level of transparency the web has lead people to expect.

We were thrilled to meet so many wonderful people and companies including Petra Vorsteher from Smaato, Lars Burk from Tesa, Jeff Jarvis author of What Would Google Do, Erik Hauth from Wer-Weiss-Was, Tim Leberecht from Frog Design, Philippe Wyssen from Red Bull AirRace, Jurgen Ahting from Wer Liefert Was, Judith Andresen from Sinnerschrader, Nicole Simon for organzing a sell out Girl Geek Dinner, Thomas Stehle from Gutscheine, Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK and being the first to officially blog about our fund raising success at Linqia, Endru Tedjasukmana from Universal McCann , Henriette Weber from Toothless Tiger, Johannes Haus and Jackson Bond from the XING team, Chris Messina and Florian Wilken from Blog.de.

The Social Network Marketplace Beta is Live

2009-04-10T12:53:00.000+02:00

In addition to securing our second round of finance early April, the Linqia Marketplace has launched in Beta. To date, 28 Social Networks have registered reaching 31,013,411 people globally.

The Linqia Marketplace connects commercial partners to Social Networks. Linqia's Marketplace acts as a supporting business development arm for key decision makers (CEO, Business Development, Key Account) at Social Networks.

Offerings from Commercial Partners could include:

Sponsorship
Content (Videos, Photographs, Editorial)
Merchandise
Market research
Applications
Advertising and much more!

Key decision makers at Social Networks are invited to register for free to the Linqia Marketplace and specify what type of offerings they are interested in receiving. Commercial Partners select relevant Social Networks, create an offer and send their messages to key decision makers via the Marketplace.

Whilst Social Networks are invited to register for free, selected Commercial Partners pay a small fee to send their messages to selected Social Networks - paying only for response. Over the next six months, Linqia will work with qualified Commercial Partners to present their high value opportunities to Social Networks.

Today, there exists over 2,000 Social Networks and Commercial Partners have limited ways of finding, identifying and presenting their offerings to Social Networks. Furthermore, the process of searching, filtering and contacting the key decision maker takes considerable time with low responses. Simultaneously, Social Networks experience challenges in sourcing relevant and high value offerings from Commercial Partners to enable them to increase engagement from their members which inevitably leads to monetization and growth.

If you are a key decision maker at a Social Network register here.

If you are a commercial partner who would like to participate in our pilot, please contact us or register your profile at the Linqia Marketplace.

For general information or inquiries, contact us or visit the Linqia Marketplace.

Linqia Closes €850,000 Financing Round

2009-04-03T12:31:00.004+02:00

Starfish Community Group S.L closed it's second financing round April, 3rd 2009 raising €850,000 from private individuals including prominent business angel Esther Dyson. With an initial seed investment of €500,000 from friends and family in October 2007 the total capital raised is €1,350,000.

Incorporated July, 4th 2007 and based out of Barcelona, Spain, Starfish Community Group S.L has invested heavily into research and development, pioneering services and solutions in the social media arena. It's core product - the Linqia Marketplace was launched early April this year. Additional products the company has developed include The Moderator Community and The Linqia Group Directory.

The company's vision is to facilitate connections and transactions between commercial partners and key decision makers of online social networks, communities and groups, enabling content, advertising, sponsorship, partnership and value based opportunities to reach pockets of highly targeted people.

Today, there exists over 2,000 social networking platforms with 750 million registered people participating in billions of conversations within 80 million+ online communities and groups.

Starfish Community Group S.L. is also proud to announce an exclusive partnership with LABEL - THE brand.intelligence COMPANY offering marketing services in Switzerland. LABEL will represent the Starfish's line of products and services in the French speaking markets: Switzerland, Belgium, Luxemburg and France.

For further information and inquiries please contact us.

The first 50 days at The Moderator Community

2009-03-12T15:02:00.014+01:00

It's been 50 days since we launched The Moderator Community and applying our extensive expertise in community building to our own community has had it's ups and downs. It's been a bumpy ride navigating around the infinite Drupal modules, uploading 100's of resources, structuring the various offerings and speaking for hours with our patient and brave early testers. As any technology company would say - 'launch the thing!' and iterate along the way.

So we feel it’s time to share with you what's happened over the last 50 days and offer a preview of what's in it for you...

Resources
Imagine spending hours, days and months searching for everything to do with online communities. Well that's what our community manager Edwina Dendler did along with the help of our members gathered more than 700 resources related to the online community sector. The top category is community management with 203 articles listed. There are loads of interesting articles which help you grow your knowledge around online communities and social media.

My all time favourite which took my learning to a whole new level is the new Nielsen Study: “Global Faces and Networked Places: A Nielsen report on Social Networking’s New Global Footprint”. Also "25 Innovative Ways Companies Are Using Twitter (That You May Not Have Heard Of Yet)" has been a great post - especially these days as social media insiders are starting to hype the micro blogging service Twitter as the new Google. So there’s no way around it anymore ;-)

On Twitter
Hot off the press! If you are one for keeping a watchful eye on the latest and greatest you can find The Moderator Community on Twitter! We'd be honored to have you follow us @themodcom to receive our daily updates and off course we'll follow you back.

Special event discounts for our members
Our aim is to bring to you a listing of all online community related events globally and as a special treat we've negotiated special offers and discounts for members of The Moderator Community to the following 3 events taking place this spring:

* Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (31st March - 3rd April): Receive a 20% discount! (contact us for the discount code)
* The Next Web in Amsterdam (15th - 16th April): Receive a €150 discount!
* Next 09 in Hamburg (5th - 6th May): Receive a 20% discount in every ticket category!

Check our Events section for details on these events and more taking place throughout the year. Our aim is provide as much value as we can for our members, so this is our first offering which we can pass on to you. We are working hard on more offerings for you guys, so stay tuned ;-)

Special interest group: Women Who Lead
Last but not least, as we have expertise in women lead online communities we’ve created a special interest group Women Who Lead for managers of communities and groups geared towards women. We offer a place tailored to the specific needs, questions and challenges community managers of women’s groups are facing. Of course we do our best to help and support you!

We're bursting with ideas on how to take the community to the next level and there will be many new exciting features coming up. So stay tuned for our next update in 50 days!

Data Portability for Conversations

2009-01-21T00:49:00.001+01:00

This past year at Linqia, we have been going deep into the conversations of the web. We have been collecting public conversations from discussion forums and communities such as Facebook Groups and looking across these islands of conversation data for insights. You'll hear more about that area of our work in the months to come.

Back in 2007 I was a founding member of the Data Portability initiative. This is the idea that our data - our contacts, our pictures, our videos, our blog posts, our lifestreams, etc - should not be locked into a single platform. Flickr, for example, is just one application for managing and sharing my photographs. I should be able to open my Flickr photographs in other applications and not be locked into a single site. Data Portability continues to evangelise this principle.

While we were looking at our conversation data we noticed something interesting about Facebook Groups. Facebook Groups are closed. It is not possible to get an RSS feed of new messages to be flowed into a viewing application of choice. So you can't view your Facebook Groups in Google Reader, or Outlook, or FriendFeed. Instead you must go to the Facebook site and explicitly look at them. We could see in our data that Facebook Groups often begin life with an explosion of engagement from their members but then withered before the spammers moved in.

We wanted our Facebook conversation data to be portable. So we created a little app called Group Feed that allowed us to bring in our Facebook Groups to a common place, slice it in different ways using tagging and then consume it via RSS in our application of choice.

So now I can:

Get a single stream of all my latest Facebook Messages from public groups in RSS format, see new messages in Google Reader and click back into the group to engage when I see something interesting. No more withering groups for me.
Tag all my startup groups and feed them into a 'startup' label I have in Google Reader.

We are sharing it for your interest. Give it a try and please let us know what you think.

All the data comes from our conversation data store and is accessed via an API that we will be making available to you in the months to come. If you think you can make something awesome with conversation data like this, we can give you something to play with so please drop us a line.

The inauguration of Linqia

2009-01-20T10:30:00.001+01:00

It's no coincidence Linqia incorporated on July 4th 2007 and officially launches its beta site January 20th 2009 - the historical day where the world celebrates the inauguration of the 44th President Barack Obama.

Politics aside. The Linqia site is live!

You'll now be able to access Group Feed where you can track the activity of your Facebook public groups (we'll be adding more platforms as we go along), The Moderator Community - a gateway for community managers, moderators, leaders and enthusiasts jam packed with 100's of resources, groups and jobs, and Linqia Labs for developers to access the deep data we mine, organize and make available to build powerful new tools that to date are not possible.

Last year we launched a search engine indexing 1,000's of communities and groups mainly from XING, ecademy, LiveJournal, SixGroups, Viadeo, Meetup, Raising Them and more. Many people signed up as members and added their groups to the index. You can still access the Linqia Group Directory and find interesting online groups to visit where people gather around a special interest topic.

It's still early days where we've only scratched the surface of what we want to achieve with Linqia. There are billions of conversations hidden deep in the web. Today there are over 2,000 community platforms, 40 million groups and 250 million people who frequent these places. Our mission is to share as much value with the data we uncover and the relationships we form with people, businesses and developers.

Come join us on our journey and drop us an email if you'd like to share your thoughts, comments or questions.

Managing your community successfully - Insights from Tribalization Study of Business

2008-08-24T12:10:00.001+02:00

How can you create a successful community? How do you approach people to become active members of your community? How do you make sure you enter into a dialogue with your members? Thousands of community owners, marketers or consultants are trying to find answers to these questions.

There are no simple answers. There are very few studies and analyses related to this topic. An interesting one is "The 2008 Tribalization of Business", a survey which has been conducted by Deloitte, Beeline Labs, and the Society for New Communications Research. They measured responses of more than 140 organizations, B2B, B2C, and non-profits which have created and manage online communities.

So, what is the greatest value of online communities?
The greatest value of online communities is increasing word of mouth (35%), increasing brand awareness (28%), bringing new ideas into the organization faster (24%) and increasing customer loyalty (24%).

The study showed that the greatest obstacles to making community work are not technology-related or getting funding, but getting people involved in the community (51%), finding enough time to manage the community (45%), and attracting people to the community (34%).

What I liked to read was that the main motivation drivers in a community are: people giving and getting help. The main drivers to community effectiveness according to the study are:

Ability for community members to connect with other like-minded people: 54%
Ability for members to help others: 43%
The community is focused around a hot topic or issue: 41%
Quality of the community manager/community management team: 33%

Further, they share their eight emerging best practices to consider then setting up a community:

1. Start with the end in mind: Be aware of your business strategy and your purpose.

2. Focus on the value to the members: Make sure you are really serving their needs and know what motivates your members.

3. Don’t start with the technology: “Too often people get drunk with Web 2.0 tool excitement and then try to push their business and customer goals into the wrong tool.”

4. Keep it simple and intuitive: Make it easy to navigate.

5. Keep it fresh and active: Constantly add content and create excitement in your community.

6. Have dynamic community leaders: Make sure you have some leaders in the community. Avoid to control the community.

7. Think through who to involve – or not: Ensure commitment from top management and help from other sides but keep them out of active management.

8. Get a passionate core of participants active before launching: Make sure you have a critical mass of passionate users before you launch.

You find more details on the study here.

Linqia Stars running with the Bulls!

2008-07-20T18:18:00.010+02:00

A remarkable weekend in Pamplona celebrating San Fermines ..

The Linqia Team took off exploring famous Spanish traditions - we went on a 2 day adventure to Pamplona on the occasion of the Festival San Fermines.

It's a deeply-rooted celebration held annually from noon 6 July, when the opening of the fiesta is marked by setting off the chupinazo to midnight 14 July. Its most famous event is the encierro, the running with the bulls. Throughout the whole week you see special street shows of dancers and street entertainers, such as carnival giants and the week-long celebration involves many other traditional and folcloric events. During this week, every person is dressed in traditional clothes in the colours of red and white!

The outcome for the Linqia team was:
Our clothes were NO LONGER white - sparkled with obligatory red wine!
After celebrating the whole night, we had two team members run at 8 a.m. : our Aussie Jay (he made it for 30 seconds) and our Belgian Star Greg who could not get enough of it and ran straight into the arena with his bull friends. So glad you both came back safe!!

Linqia Star at the top of Europe

2008-07-13T19:14:00.000+02:00

The team has been using the metaphor of mountain climbing to track the progress towards our quarterly goals at Linqia. This gave me the idea to take it a step further and to attempt the ascension of Mont Blanc whose 4,808m summit makes it the highest mountain of Europe.

I took the opportunity of a long weekend in June to leave the office and to head up north with David and Octavi, two friends from the Club Excursionista de Gracia. Taking into consideration the unusual quantity of snow at that time of the year and the associated risks of avalanches, we decided to go for one of the classic routes of Mont Blanc called The Voie des Cristalliers.

We arrived in Chamonix on Saturday morning (21/06) where we had breakfast (yummy French croissant are so good) followed by a short session of shopping (boots, gloves and climbing gear). We then drove to Les Houches, a ski resort located at 6km from Chamonix, where we left the car and started the ascent towards the Nid d'Aigle. After 4 hours of walking, we arrived at the Refuge de Tête Rousse (3,167m) where we spent the night. I keep wonderful memories of the landscape at sun set.

On Sunday morning (22/06), we left the refuge around 8:00AM as the snow was still hard and this facilitated the ascent towards the next shelter called Le Refuge du Goûter (3,817m). That section was the most difficult (and fun) part of the route with a mix of snow and rock climbing. I would have loved going down and going up again. During the afternoon, we practised crevasse rescue in a safe place above the refuge. One of use would simulate a fall on icy slope while the other two would rescue him. On Sunday night, we went to bed at around 8:00PM as we would have to wake up at 2:00AM the following morning. We did not sleep very well due to the altitude and of the promiscuity in the dormitory.

On Monday (23/06), we were out of bed at 2:00AM sharp, ready for a quick breakfast and eager to reach the top of Europe. There were about 75 people in refuge and everybody was busy to get equipped with the usual gear including harness, crampons and ice axes.

We got out of the refuge at 2:40AM and started the walk following the headlamps of people who had left shortly before us. I was so excited to walk at night in such a peaceful environment. I could not see the surrounding mountains but I could feel their energy and I had a lot of respect for their majesty. We reached the Dôme du Goûter (4,304m) within 1.5 hour and headed towards the Vallot cabin before attacking L'arrête des Bosses, the ridge that leads to the summit. The wind was blowing a lot while we were exposed on the ridge.

We eventually reached the top of Mont Blanc at 7:10AM. I felt very happy to get to the top with David and Octavi. We walked at the same rhythm supporting each other during the whole ascension. We stayed on the summit during 15 minutes, enough time to contemplate the scenery towards Italy, Switzerland and France and to take a few pictures.

Unfortunately, it was time to go down. I would have loved staying there a bit longer but we were getting cold and there was a long way back to sea level.

The ascension of Mont Blanc means a lot to me. I wanted to do for a long time, actually since I saw it for the first time in 2000, and I am proud to have done without a guide and with my Catalan friends. In addition, this personal achievement was a great opportunity to live the Linqia values such as Passionate, Team Player, Fun and Healthy outside the work environment.

Advertising in Social Networks

2008-07-11T19:20:00.000+02:00

It's well known that Social Networking Activity is growing enormously worldwide.

An interesting study provided by Datamonitor predicts within the next four years there will be 107 millions members of Social Networks in Europe - compared to a current total of 41,7 mio Europeans.

The European Ranking is:
No 1: UK is the leader with 6 million users growing up to 27,1 mio in 2012.
No 2: France follows with current 8,9 mio users increasing up to 21,3 mio in 2012.
No 3: Germany currently has 8,6 mio users growing up to 21,7 mio of users in 2012.
No 4: Spain has 2,9 Social Network users and is very likely to reach 7,3 mio within the next four years.

This enormous growth introduces significant opportunities for today's marketers assuming that they have the right strategies in place. Marketers who would like to be successful need to know which kinds of advertising formats are effective within Social Networks.

The survey Community Effects 2008 has verified that sponsored music, viral videos and games are most accepted by community members. "A particularly promising strategy is a combination of decently communicated advertising messages, a high fun factor and the possibility to communicate indirectly with other users."

More than every second questioned participant evaluates music-clips (59%) and video-campaigns (51%) as a throughout positive advertising medium. On the contrary, most community users reject classic contests (30 %) and implored Flash-Layers (31 %).

Linqia's Chief Happiness Officer

2008-07-08T12:36:00.000+02:00

Hi! I'm a new Linqia team star. My name is Ana Carolina and I am from Patagonia, Argentina. It´s been already two months since I became the “Chief Happiness Officer” at Linqia.

The best surprise in joining this team was to realize how everyone lives the company's culture & values. We organize ourselves to live each value every day. This is shown during our daily morning huddle of 10 minutes, where each Linqia Star provides a brief overview to the team about his or hers “what’s up”, “metrics for the day” and “stucks”.

Every Friday we have an extended team meeting adding our highlights of the week and talking deeper about operations and projects such as our values. I find this meeting very special since each one of us has the opportunity to share his or her personal and/or professional highlights with the rest of the team.

Moreover we enrich each other with special contributions from different team members e.g. an inspirational message in form of a video clip. Last week JC, our Interim COO, has inspired me deeply by showing us this video:

Last but not least, I love the weekly team meetings because Maria (Linqia's CEO) brings delicious croissants for everyone!

Linqia is giving me the discipline to organize my daily tasks in order to be more efficient and to better structure my day. The question is: “It's not about being busy. What are you busy about?”

Also, more and more understanding the way in which Linqia highlights the potential of online communities & groups, encourages myself to be the moderator of my own group. It´s called Eco Snowboarding. I believe that loving the mountains demands participation in the struggle to prevent that global warming melts our snow.

It´s a pleasure to work with such a wonderful professional team.

Thanks Linqia!

Ana Carolina Vicente

Founding CTO of Kazaa Phil Morle joins Linqia

2008-07-07T23:53:00.000+02:00

How does a young start-up based out of Barcelona attract a world class CTO such as Phil Morle?

Synchronicity. Diligently reading blog articles circulated by mavens. Digging deeper.

Late last year an email highlighting the work of social networking expert Ross Dawson landed in my inbox. What aroused my curiosity and immediately prompted me to schedule a meeting in Sydney over Christmas was Ros's Web 2.0 framework. During this meeting Ross recommended I meet with Mick Liubinskas who was working at Tangler. We were keen to feature Tangler's groups at Linqia and over a coffee in Pyrmont we shared our passions to leverage social networks to connect to developing countries. Mick promised to follow-up with interim CTO of Tangler Phil Morle to see how he could squeeze Linqia into their tight development schedule. Three months later Phil was in Barcelona for a one week technology assignment which eventually lead him to joining our team as acting CTO.

With the Linqia team, Phil will take on big challenges as well as an equally big opportunities. He will be working with our engineering team based out of Barcelona, Pisa (Italy) and London juggling an Australian/ European time zone.

Phil describes himself as a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) with experience running massive scale consumer internet businesses. He was the founding CTO at Kazaa where he was part of developing a technology strategy which saw 5 million users online at any one time, millions of downloads per day and a total global user base of over 100 million, all this powered by innovative technology, a globally distributed team and a sprinkling of imagination.

2 Linqia Birthday Stars

2008-07-06T14:11:00.000+02:00

This was a special week at Liniqa!

On the 30th of June, we celebrated the (.. – no numbers mentioned here ;-)) birthday of our CEO Maria. We surprised her, probably on one of her most stressful days in the last months, with a delicious chocolate starfish cake. She did not hesitate any second to chop off one arm proving whether it's a real LINCKIA starfish which grows another one!! Probably it did - in our tummies ;-)

A few days later, we celebrated Linqia’s 1st Birthday since its day of company constitution on 4th of July 2007! It’s been more than one year now since we created the company and we are very happy and proud to see what the Linqia team has achieved and created so far!

Maria's Birthday Message to Linqia and the team: "July 4th is celebrated as Independence Day in the United States and closely ties in to our theme at Linqia with an intention to liberate millions of groups from the few social networks who benefit significantly in fame and fortune. Our mission is to redistribute the wealth of knowledge, opportunities and revenue as well as connect people and leaders around the world to one another."

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

“MeetUp” and find your local groups on Linqia!

2008-06-30T13:11:00.000+02:00

Since today Linqia enables you to find 40.531 local Meetup groups.

Founded in 2002, Meetup is a US based online social networking portal facilitating offline group meetings in various localities around the world. Meetup enables members to find and join groups unified by a common interest, such as politics, books, games, movies, health, pets, careers or hobbies. Users can insert their city and the topic they want to meet about, and Meetup helps them arrange a place and time to meet.

Find more about Meetup!
Maybe you would like to meet some people of these groups?

The London Entrepreneur MeetUp Group
Entrepreneurs from London who meet regularly, usually each second Thursday of the month.

The Barcelona 'REAL INTERCAMBIO' Meetup Group
This group is for anyone who is interested in meeting to exchange the languages of English and Castellano to actually speak the language they are trying to learn in a relaxed and friendly environment.

Single in Manhattan
A group dedicated at Singles in Manhattan which had 786 meetups so far. Maybe you will find your love here ;-)

Linqia team moves to its garage

2008-06-26T18:21:00.000+02:00

... well not quite. But it does have a garage door as it's entry. Starting from uptown Gracia, moving to downtown Gracia and landing back uptown to a quaint village known as Sarría.

After more than one year in pure startup mode working from several office centers, we have finally built our own nest and found our own office. From now on, we are working in a spacious 2 floor office loft – with the obligatory garage downstairs where our developers are based and working full speed ahead to get Linqia fully up and running - yes, now we are a real Internet Startup ;-)

Historically, Sarría used to be a small village and summer residency for the bourgeoisie. Unbelievably it took them half a day with horse and carriage to travel from downtown Barcelona to Sarría. Today, although close to downtown Barcelona, Sarrià remains the cosy village it always has been with narrow little streets and lovely houses. We enjoy having lunch in the sun at Plaza San Marco and discovering all the tiny and neat stores and restaurants dotted along the cobbled stone streets.

A wonderful place providing all of us with pure energy!

LiveJournal groups on Linqia!

2008-05-26T20:30:00.000+02:00

From today onwards you will find more than 430.000 groups of the community LiveJournal on Linqia!

LiveJournal is a US based online community, a social network, and a place for self-expression. They started in 1999 with the purpose for high school friends to be updated on each other’s activities. Now it has transformed into a community where users can keep a blog, journal or diary. They also offer a free service for all journaling and blogging needs.

Find out more about LiveJournal on their Linqia profile!

Amongst the 430.000 groups we would like to highlight the following groups of interest:
Business Majors: A group created for people to help each other in their college/career path.
The boat building community: There are some special designers or boat constructors out there who might find this group interesting to exchange knowledge and experience in building a device or vehicle for traveling on water.
Medical Field: This is a group for people working in the medical sector, e.g. doctors, students, nurses, medical technicians, pharmacists, social workers, and anyone else!

50% of the world to have access to internet by 2015

2008-05-03T16:23:00.000+02:00

The head of AMD, Hector Ruiz is devoted to his company's 50x15 initiative, which seeks to give 50 percent of the world's population access to the internet by 2015.

Allow your mind to boggle about what opportunities could unfold when Hector's dream of connectivity is realised.

Linqia is listing all Raisingthem groups, the community for parents!

2008-03-21T08:59:00.000+01:00

We are very happy to announce that the parental community Raisingthem have listed all their 1.356 groups on Linqia.

Raisingthem is a US based community founded in 2007. Parents can exchange their knowledge and experience about the raise of their small ones. You can chat in online groups, meet like-minded parents who live near you, join local playgroups, or get information on kids activities and parenting tips from other members.

Have a look at their Linqia Profile!

Some Raisingthem groups which we found particularly interesting:
Raisingthem Newcomers Club: For all newcomers on Raisingthem helping you to find other parents and new friends in your area!
2 in Diapers: If you are a mom with children born close together, you can exchange experience and get advice from other mom's in this group!
Professional Moms: Connect with other mother's who are working and raising their children at the same time!

Six Groups are listed on Linqia!

2008-03-18T18:18:00.000+01:00

We are very happy to announce that six groups is presenting 160 of their 600 communities and groups on Linqia.

Six groups is a flexible online community platform created in Hamburg, Germany. They enable you to start your own community - for private costumers as well as for companies planning to start their own community. Most communities and groups on six groups are in German and some in English. Soon they will expand their offering to more languages.

You can chose every topic and your design from a large variety of templates and define the data fields for your members' profiles. To start your community, you have access to basic features such as a text, photo and media gallery, messaging and friends allowing you to organize your private or professional social networks online.

Have a look at six groups' Linqia Profile

Some interesting sixgroups on Linqia:
Sailr: A social network for sailors
EM2008: Six groups is preparing for the fan community for the 2008 Soccer European Championship
SEO: Community for people interested in Search Engine Optimization

Neurona’s Groups on Linqia!

2008-03-13T17:52:00.000+01:00

From today on you can search for 400 groups living on the Spanish Community Neurona!

Neurona is a free virtual community based in Barcelona, Spain. Their aim is to promote old school and business friends to re-encounter and to enable the creation of personal and business networks. Neurona can help you find a job through your own contacts, improve your professional career or search for partners, providers and clients.

Moreover, you can establish contact with trusted professionals or look for specific advice from experts. Neurona used to approach mainly Spanish speaking professionals however there are already many groups in English, Italian and Portuguese.

You can find more information on Neurona's profile on Linqia!

These Neurona groups might be interesting to some of you:
Energías Renovables (Renewable Energy)
Students & Young Marketers
Project Management
ONG (Non-Governmental Organization)

XING groups listed on Linqia!

2008-02-23T20:23:00.000+01:00

We have the pleasure to announce that XING is one of Linqia's launch partners.

XING is a business community from Hamburg, founded in 2003. XING hosts more than 7.800 groups - 4.407 of them you can already find on Linqia.

The majority of users comes from Germany, however, XING is already used by people from over 190 countries. Available languages include English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Dutch, Chinese, Finnish, Swedish, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Turkish and Hungarian.

XING enables its members to discover professional people, opportunities and privileges through its capability and advanced contact management tools. The community offers personal profiles, sub-groups, discussion forums, event coordination, and other common social networking features. The multilingual groups and forums also give members access to industry-specific expertise and allow them to exchange ideas and perspectives.

XING is used predominantly to search for new business partners, initiating new business contacts, opening up new markets, finding partnership opportunities and for setting up and managing existing business relations.

Please read find further information on Linqia's XING Profile.

Interesting XING groups on Linqia:
Global Business Women
Dropping knowledge
Amazing Dreamers
After Work Golf
New York and Washington sponsored by TransatlanticIR

Connecting entrepreneurs in developing countries to communities in developing worlds

2008-02-23T20:09:00.000+01:00

The Trestle Group Foundation is another inspiration for the social vision of Linqia. Here is a video of the foundation working with female entrepreneur Luna Shamsuddoha in Bangladesh having connected her to people in developing countries. We can see a direct coloration of how online communities can provide people, knowledge and opportunities to people in developing countries. It's only a matter of time before these people in developing countries start on a grand scale to gather and collaborate in online communities. And connections is what they will need.

A unique approach to category sponsorship

2008-02-22T22:28:00.000+01:00

Weblin, ESADE, AutoScout24 and BuyVIP are all category launch sponsors at Linqia.

What's so special about being a launch sponsor?

Beyond the usual 'branding' exposure throughout the Linqia site (logo on home page, advertisement on every group profile in chosen category and search results), sponsors will be introduced to every community leader within their sponsored category as Linqia begins the claiming process.

Shortly, Linqia will commence establishing contact with every moderator of selected communities and groups inviting them to claim their profile at Linqia and at the same time will be asked whether they are interested in a value added relationship with their category sponsor.

To date, it's been very challenging for brands to connect with smaller niche communities and groups and visa versa. Linqia aims to open this channel up. If you are interested in learning more about sponsoring a key category at Linqia and being introduced to 1000's of community and group leaders please contact us.

Push the button!

2008-02-21T22:10:00.000+01:00

"Launch it Andy!" 9pm Wednesday night Christian finally pushes the button. 6,523 listings - mainly from our community launch partners XING, Ecademy and a lengthy list Edwina and Fredi have been compiling for the last three months.

Daniela calls from home after lying in bed all day with her sprained ankle excited beyond words. "It's live! It's live! We're live!". Our celebrations are decentralized that evening with the boys eating tapas and drinking beer in a smoky bar. Marco our ruby developer from Italy flew in for the week. Jean Michel is preparing for this weeks Barcelona ruby gathering. Toni our Product Manager extraordinare is at home stuck to his monitor ensuring the starfish breathes enough air to survive the night. And Gregory is resting his brain from all the hours of user testing giving us confidence the site actually makes sense.

It's show time!

Barcelona Web2.0 Community

2008-02-19T17:13:00.000+01:00

Some days ago we created the Barcelona Web2.0 Community for all the who's who of the Web 2.0 society in Barcelona.

It's a group living on Facebook where we gather all people in our industry and provide alerts to upcoming events and local news. Every person who is related to Barcelona and interested in Web2.0 is welcome to join us!

We meet up every now and then personally at Barcelona Web2.0 Tapas Crawl !

Go Fredi!

2008-02-15T18:06:00.000+01:00

And the award for adding most groups to Linqia before our launch next week goes to Fredi! There's a group jam going on at your profile.

Anybody want to challenge him?

Linqia is green!

2008-02-01T19:18:00.000+01:00

Linqia is moving toward becoming a carbon neutral company. From the 1st o January 2008, our servers are running with renewable energies coming mainly from hydropower.

Internet has a growing carbon footprint ... In the UK, it is now similar to the aviation industry and its skyrocketing growth means it will soon surpass the poster child for climate change, a report by Global Action Plan with guidance from the Environmental IT Leadership Team (EILT) revealed in january 2008.

Hopefully, Green hosting is becoming mainstream. Dreamhost, one of the major US hosting company went green in August 2007. Aiso, an innovative Californian hosting is using solar panels and batteries to power its servers:

Later or sooner, Kyoto 2 protocol (after 2012) and the EU Commission will push the industry towards a reduction of their carbon footprint. On the other hand, the IT industry will save a lot of money by running energy efficient servers.

I believe that XXI st centuries web2.0 start ups have to lead the way and let their users know about their carbon footprint ;-)

Ecademy is partnering with Linqia!

2008-01-22T20:48:00.000+01:00

We are very happy to announce that Ecademy is partnering with Linqia!

Ecademy is a well established UK based community and social network for Business People founded in 1998. The community hosts 3.900 groups of which Linqia is currently listing 1.719 .

Ecademy enables professionals to connect through online networking, at business networking events and through business networking groups. You can use Ecademy to make contacts, find work, advertise your services worldwide, get business support and attend offline networking events worldwide.

Have a look what Linqia members say about Ecademy here!

You can find some very interesting Ecademy groups on Linqia:
Ecademy Brazil
Singapore Ecademy
Ecademy USA
Mentoring Ecademy Club Leaders

Meeting Laurel Papworth

2008-01-14T06:31:00.000+01:00

There's few outstanding online community builders in this world and considering there are over 40 million communities and groups I'd like to think that more talented people will step up to this role. Laurel Papworth is one of the rare breed. She's been building online communities since the early days of internet when discussion boards and forums were thriving - mainly around gaming, academic and technology enthusiasts.

I met with her last week in Sydney and what truly impressed me was her pure passion for protecting this emerging space from predators who can potentially destroy a community overnight and educating anybody who is willing to listen or read on building sustainable and valuable communities on the web. Laurel walks her talk and gave up the opportunity to attend a three day luxury retreat for Venture Capitalists who are enthusiastic to learn about social networks and online communities and instead spend a week teaching school children what she's learned over the past 10 years.

Good on you Laurel!

Linqia goes bush

2008-01-03T06:24:00.000+01:00

In the heart of the land downunder, 5 hours drive from Sydney, Australia, we've set up our Australian Linqia office ;-)

Linqia´s first christmas!

2007-12-22T18:49:00.000+01:00

Edwina and Fredi were nominated as our Chief Christmas Officers. One day they surprised us with a wonderfully decorated Christmas office and our corporate Christmas tree – with a star as topping of course!

In the evening, we started off with Cava and traditional Spanish pastries, like Turron, Neulas, Barquillos and the absolutely delicious Turron de Crema Catalana!

Fredi showed us a neat trick about eating habits of Neulas. Being stuffed full with sweets, we went for a walk to the restaurant. We strolled down the illuminated streets of Passeig de Gracia and Barrio Gothico admiring the fantastic array of Christmas lights. Fredi, our local fellow, took us on a few detours leading us to Barcelona´s secret places you wouldn´t normally see: la "Tortuga de Barcelona", la "Fuente del l`ou com balla" and "Placa de San Felipe Neri" next to the charming boutique hotel Neri.

We ended in one of the cosiest restaurants Limbo in Raval. We shared stories about the craziest things we´ve done in our lifes – the leaders definitely are Christian, Christopher and Fredi. Maria was not bad either! Edwina and I are still trying to remember if we´ve ever done anything crazy like these guys;-) We´ll keep that secret! The evening ended with a homemade dice playing for our Kris Kringle presents – also known as Jul Klub (no-one ever knows how this is spelled) or Wichteln!

The Linqia Team wishes a very Merry Christmas to all of you!

Elastic Computing

2007-12-19T01:08:00.000+01:00

Sometimes there are new developments out there which concepts makes you tingle. They usually don't come twice from the same company. But thats the case with the S3 and EC2 from Amazon.

We already incoporated S3 into our applications. That makes us very easy on how to store binary data. But here comes EC2.

Grabbing a Debian image and modify it for out purpose and store it on S3 was just a bit of work. The image instance boots within 3 minutes into a full fledged application server with a simple command, and you can boot up as many as you like - figure that - an "unlimited" amount of servers at your fingertips to either hold to the load and serve the spikes. Fantastic. That makes me seriously happy. Forget about managing your machine park. You pay what you get. No need to maintain X machines for daily spikes or slashdotting events. No more idling heat emitters.

Some work has still to be done, of course. First, telling our load balancer that there are a new servers to serve. Second, observe the load of all servers running and deploy/shut-down servers on demand automatically. And if you are on Rails - guys from Thoughtworks wrote handy capistrano recipes interfacing with EC2

Some things have to be taken care of depending on what you want to do. First, data on these servers are transient - you shut it down, you loose the data you might have stored, not a problem in our case, but Amazon just started a limited beta with SimpleDB which addresses this problem. Second - it's still beta and we don't know how it performs real-life, but reports are great so far.

Last but not least there are many other applications for EC2. Think about on demand processing power for computing intensive applications. Computing cost start at 10 cent ($) the hour. That makes roughly $70 a month for a machine. Check the Amazon computing specs. Kind of a re-invention of renting mainframe time :-)

The future is bright - the future is ... elastic.

Share the wealth

2007-12-04T11:00:00.000+01:00

Imagine a platform which enabled the "wealth" to be shared....knowledge, human connections, money, opportunities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvTFKpIaQhM

Linqia Stars are moving to their new office

2007-11-20T16:28:00.000+01:00

The Linqia Star Team is growing and growing. After only 8 months of operations we already had to search for more office space.

Just before our first teambuilding exercise and heading off to our first company retreat in the wonderful Hotel ElConvent at Costa Brava, we switched offices via full speed packing and unpacking within two hours. Years ago moving office automatically meant a lot of grief. Huge IT devices, Folders, Papers, Books and a lot of office stationary to be carried around. In our case – since Maria, our CEO, is striving for a paperless office – we could make the speed office move happen by just filling up a quarter of a minivan !

We moved from the district of Gracia 800 meters south to the vibrant heart of Barcelona where Paseig de Gracia, Diagonal and Gran de Gracia meet. We are absolutely happy here and have deeply fallen in love with our new office – which provides us with a sunny balcony, a fully equipped kitchen and very nice new office neighbours. We are based in the international office center GG15 hosting Start Up companies like Parship, Mangotv or Ohmtv. The next round of growth, development and FUN has started!!

Our new address is:

Gran de Gracia 15, 2ª 1º
08012 Barcelona

The making of Linqia's top five values

2007-11-19T18:00:00.000+01:00

The vision of our co-founder Christopher Pommerening - a fellow EO member, is for Barcelona to become the entrepreneurial hub for ambitious new startups. Part of this vision included Linqia serving as a case study for how to create the ideal successful company without all the pitfalls and obvious mistakes he's seen time and again.

To kick off this process we invited our team of 9 Linqia Stars to experience a weekend retreat like no other. The aim was to ensure total alignment amongst the team in respect to what Linqia is, why was Linqia created, our company values and our top five priorities.

We invited one of the most talented strategic facilitators JC Duarte to share the weekend in El Convent in the Costa Brava last weekend with our team (Daniela, Andi, Edwina, Christian, Sven, Jean Michelle, Marco and me).

The process of creating the company values is a simple and extraordinary experience. JC asked each team member to share the qualities of a 'Linqia Star' and the qualities of a 'Black Hole'. We shared words which reflected people we'd like to work with (team member, supplier, clients, investor, etc) and people we wouldn't want to work with.

As you can see, it's quite a long list! The process which follows is to ensure that each undesired trait is listed in the desired list (the black words). Once the 'Best Linqia Star' list is finalised, we narrowed down the list grouping similar traits - for example caring, kind and warm could be grouped under the word 'Empathetic'. Narrowing the list to 13 traits and then voted each on our top five.

The outcome? We look for Linqia stars who are Passionate, Team Player, Authentic, Resourceful, Fun and Healthy.

Jeremiah Owyang in Barcelona!

2007-11-16T18:38:00.000+01:00

In traditional starfish style the first statement Jeremiah Owyang proclaimed to a small group of people at the Buda Bar in Barcelona last week was "this event is not about me... it's about the community". I asked Jeremiah how he manages to get by with the 1,000's of people he meets, the 100's blog posts, 300 emails plus a day and holding a full time job at Forresters . He answered "I go to sleep around midnight, wake up at 2am, blog for a few hours to keep up with the rest of the world and then get up around 7am".

If there's one thing I've learned about attending years of networking events is to focus on quality conversations rather than saying "hi bye" to everybody. Two people left a notable impression on me. Dan Calladine - Research Director at Isobar for his incredible outlook on life which you can read at his blog. Thanks Dan - now I know who owns the URL www.hop-skip-jump.com . And secondly, Simon McDermott from Attentio who wins the award for asking the best questions. Never give up being inquisitive Lennert - it's the one secret trait that most people neglect.

Read Jeremiah's post for a flavor of what we experienced and how "It’s obvious from the culture in Barcelona that it’s a community of sharing". . Jeremiah is a true catalyst inspires others to take action.

The name "Linqia"

2007-07-04T17:58:00.000+02:00

One of the joys of starting a new company is coming up with a name...not! We must admit that we struggled over six months and it was in the nth hour when the name Linqia was offered as a possibility by our first Linqia star Daniela Arens.

Having just read the book The Starfish and The Spider (mandatory reading at Linqia) co-authored by good friend and mentor Rod Beckstrom, Daniela spotted the reference to Linckia (LIN-kee-a). Linckia starfish are common in Australia and other parts of the Pacific and unlike other starfish, they can cast off an arm without any part of the central body attached and that arm will slowly grow into a complete starfish. The perfect metaphor for a decentralized organisation and what we envision Linqia to become.

We've found many people spell 'Linqia' in many ways - Linquia, Linqua and Linckia but hey - who knew how to spell google when it first appeared.

Linqia conceived on a beach

2007-07-04T17:34:00.000+02:00

Linqia was conceived on a beach in Lisbon, Portugal.

Too many companies have been born out of their parents’ garages that a garage has become a cliché. In the spirit of its brand, Linqia had unique beginnings. No wonder then it is the FIRST online community and group aggregator and vertical search engine.

On that sandy beach, together with three close friends we talked about our passions: the search for greater love, entrepreneurship, protecting the ocean and The Hunger Project. We dreamed about making a difference in the world in our own little way. We thought this could best be achieved by starting with the end in mind.

That day in October 2006, Linqia was born.

Our vision? Well we had two. A business vision and a social vision. Our business vision is to be the leading directory of online communities and groups. Our social vision is to connect the developing world to the developed world through online communities and groups.