Market Me First - The Positive Career and Work Action Plan Market Yourself | Make Money | Be Happy

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Since 2005. Market yourself. Find better work. Make a name. Survive Layoffs. Be successful.

Wednesday

LinkedIn - Hello

I use LinkedIn.

Where is LinkedIn's customer service?

I have sent an email every day for the past week to LinkedIn's customer service and have not received an answer. Not even an autoresponder.

"But Jack.. LinkedIn is free, how can you expect them to scale support and actually make any money?"

The value of the application is in subscriber numbers. The more subscribers, the greater value the application.

Each subscriber has a unique content page. Each unique content page has a number of ads.

There are millions of user created content pages each potentially generating small amounts of ad revenue every month for LinkedIn.

Multiply this number times the number of subscribers and you have a working example of the long tail.

This is one weakness for Web 2.0 companies - customer service. If users cannot use the application, they move on. The circle does not hold, the ends fall apart. The application unravels.
LinkedIn - please answer my email. Thank you.

Social Networks and Society

Read Mashable everyday (like you should) and find out about the dozen or so social networks open for subscription daily and you understand what is happening.

Social Networking is hot and big business. And although MySpace will get all the attention, the hot, hot, hot area will be in targeted niche social networks. Think social networks for seniors (hot!), veterans, doctors, and so on.

Work 2.0

My concentration on Marketing Me is using Web 2.0 applications, like social networks, to better market yourself for potential revenue generating opportunities - jobs, contract, consulting, speaking, writing and marketing.

So far, I am still looking for a Web 2.0 application which will help make "job" searches and trusted resume submissions, better. In my world it works for both the job seeker and job finder.
I truly believe we are about to see the end (in the next decade) of several "jobs" as described currently - Full time employment, employer funded benefits, deductions for government programs, etc. Rather, we are going to see a world of part-time, contracted projects with less supervision in exchange for non-traditional work environments.

Charity 2.0

Seth Godin is running a Squidoo Lens on NPO's using Web 2.0 effectively. I think in the very near future, (like tomorrow) this will have the same novelty affect an email address had on a business card in 1994 or seeing a URL on a movie billboard in 1995 - minimal and short lived.

I am not surprised by non-profits using blogs, podcasts or social networks to build "awareness". These people have used mailing lists and phone banks for years. Using scalable Internet applications for the same results is expected.

I will be surprised, however, when politicians actually come down from their ivory towers and join social networks, answer their email and allow their constituents to "digg" legislation. As if...

Society 2.0

Social networks have evolved from "chat rooms" and curiosities and become necessary applications like email and instant messaging. We have take the application from the desktop and brought it truly online.

Will it evolve further into banded, trusted communities which "follow me" through my day and activities? Most surely.

Will social networks suffer and stumble? Of course. But email suffered from spam yet continues as does instant messaging and open websites (remember the concept of websites as channels one would subscribe too?).

Does this cover the world? No, but all of these bolded keywords came up this week and shouted at me. More will come.
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