I had the pleasure of welcoming one of the co-founders of LinkedIn, now its CTO, Jean-Luc Vaillant, on a panel on social media for business organized by the French-American Chamber of Commerce that I moderated. I had little to do, as I had remarkable panelists: Kelly Graham from Cisco, Ken Kaplan from Intel, William Gaultier from e-Storm and Harry McCraken from Technologizer. Jean-Luc was the tech guru of the group. Vibrant, crisp, and guess what? just as business-savvy as everybody else – for he is one of these die-hard engineers for whom building things that work for people is a must.

Although the phrase “social media” did not exist in 1996 (it was coined in 2004 by Chris Shipley), Jean-Luc’s Vaillant’s life in this country is all about social media and social networking. He came from France to the Silicon Valley thanks to a job posting on a newsgroup (comp.lang.c++.thread) that specialized in parallel programming in C++. Although job postings were unwelcome in this tiny world of hyper-techies, somebody from Fujitsu was desperate enough to find an engineer with a strong experience in Solaris, C++, parallel computing, and highly scalable system to take the risk of upsetting the community. This was Jean-Luc’s good fortune, as he was wondering how to come to the US, where he had only spent six months as an intern at Bell Labs. He was hired over the phone and obtained his visa. On November 1, 1996, a date that he still cherishes, he landed in San Francisco with his kids, his wife, and his luggage to join a fascinating project, WorldsAway, a new species of online service and one of the first virtual worlds, “part chat room, part adventure game, part puppet show, part simulation,” which Robert Rossney described extensively for a Wired June 1996 article called Metaworlds. A fabulous experience. “Who doesn’t dream of creating a whole new world?” he likes to say. This was also the beginning of a long-lasting relationship with Reid Hoffman, who was the general manager and product manager for WorldsAway. who left to start Socialnet.com during the Summer of 1997 – Jean-Luc joined him in May 1998.

“I came for a great project, WorldsAway. But the whole thing fizzled away. There was a big problem with the business model, and ultimately, it wasn’t my thing to work for an established company. As soon as I set foot in the Valley, I felt that I had to be part of what this place was really about, new entrepreneurial endeavors. So I joined Socialnet.com enthusiastically.” The company was eventually acquired by Match.com, but it expanded Jean-Luc’s experience in a big way. The focus wasn’t to be part of a newsgroup as he had been, nor was it about building a virtual community as in WorldsAway, it was about matching people to one another, facilitating their ability to connect. To this day he is still proud of the matching engine (”still the best dating matching system IMHO” he writes on his LinkedIn profile) that he built with his team. Incidentally, he also met three of the additional co-founders of LinkedIn, Allen Blue, Yan Pujante, and Chris Saccheri.

“Once an engineer, always an engineer.” Jean-Luc continued to expand his understanding of the social Web. It was not enough to have people connect optimally, maybe they could also share objects. This took him to join Spotlife, which offered a stored video service within Yahoo Mail to bring personal video broadcasting to the masses, and ultimately Logitech (which acquired Spotlife). He became the technical manager for Quicksend, a photo sharing service and took charge of the IM Companion product, a P2P video application for instant messaging. But as extraordinary as Logitech had become under the guidance of Guerrino de Luca, the call for more entrepreneurship was stronger than job security, even if the family had welcomed a third child in 2000. So in 2002, after working for five companies in seven years at an unabated pace, he joined the gang of buddies that was to start LinkedIn.

As he tells it: “We were brainstorming on what our next startup would be and around the Summer of 2002, Reid pinged me on a new idea. The idea was to create a company around the Internet consumer without having to get a crazy amount of funding to acquire members. At the time there were companies like Hot or Not with a traffic explosion, but they had no way to monetize. Between us all we had an amazing experience on all the aspects of viral marketing on Internet as well as the social networking power of the Web. So we created a prototype. In the beginning it was supposed to be a sort of week-end hobby. But very quickly, Reid felt that there were other companies in our space. We were faced with the risk that somebody would be first on the market. Ryze.com was founded late 2001 by Adrian Scott to help people leverage their business networks. Plaxo launched in November 2002. We had to get serious and we did. We all decided to leave our day job. The company was launched in December 2002 and by March 2003 the core team was in place.” The rest is history. LinkedIn is the most valuable business social network, and potentially, a critical platform for any consistent business-driven social media strategy. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc remains incredibly simple and I am impressed to see how open he was to the questions or suggestions of numerous budding entrepreneurs sitting in the room where I moderated my panel.

Earlier this week, I had the privilege of delivering an introductory speech for a great product, ObjectiveMarketer, in front of remarkable executives and CIOs from the European Institutions hosted by Cisco Systems. It’s always a challenge to speak to an extraordinarily knowledgeable audience that is well versed in both technologies and trends, but it is also a rewarding experience. Below is a summary of my presentation.

I focused on the fact that social media are the very essence of the Internet, and in many ways, its revenge. The expression “Social Media” was coined by Chris Shipley fairly recently, in 2004 (BlogOn 2004), when she announced a conference designed to explore the rising business opportunities in blogging and social networking to be held in July at Berkeley’s Haas Business School. Blogging that had started in the mid-1990’s was blooming left and right, and social networks were becoming the talk of the town. Friendster and Meetup had been created in 2002, MySpace, Linkedin, Rize, and many others in 2003, and Facebook (albeit still unknown) was to receive its first investment of US$500,000 from Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal (June 2004). As we all know, since that time, the number of social networks has increased considerably. There are hundreds of them. The short list of the major ones provided by Wikipedia includes about 160 sites. When you add up the number of members of the seven biggest social networks, you easily pass the one billion users. The number of social networks users is way higher than the number of Internet users (approximately 1.67 billion people worldwide), which is not surprising as each individual can have several social network personas.

While such massive emergence of social networks comes right after the dotcom bust, it’s by no means a comparable phenomenon. It’s the expression of what Internet was from day one, a place where people wanted to express themselves whose voices were somewhat hijacked by the dotcom hysteria — and only waiting to break loose. In short, social media as we know them today are the revenge of the Internet.

Social networking was the raison d’être of the Internet – and actually predated it. In the early eighties, multiple efforts to optimize the interconnection of computer networks (initially started by RAND Corporation in the fifties to facilitate cooperation between its research teams in Pennsylvania and California) came to fruition, and the need to unify communication protocols led to the adoption of TCP/IP in 1982 — along with the definition of the word “Internet.” However, Internet or not, technology-enabled interconnections of geographically dispersed people had already started to expand beyond research organizations, reaching sundry university groups. The first real structured social networks appeared with the first NewsGroups: Usenet was conceived in 1979 by two students from Duke University. Discussion groups multiplied: in 1981, Ira Fuchs created BITNET (acronym of “Because It’s Time Network”) for liberal arts professors, and by 1984, it was connecting over 150 campuses. In 1986, Eric Thomas, then a student at l’Ecole centrale de Paris, invented LISTSERV, an automated mailing list manager that enabled users to join a list without the need for human administration; this introduced the concept of a list owner.

Throughout the eighties, services proliferated. User forums sprang left and right on CompuServe, and in the course of the nineties, everybody progressively adopted the Word Wide Web, a system of interlinked documents using TCP/IP, that Tim Berners-Lee and Roger Cailliau had set up in 1989/1990 to enable researchers at the CERN to share information. The increase of Internet users expanded and modernized the concept of NewsGroups. That’s the key to the success of companies such as eGroups, started in 1997: eGroups had 18 millions users when they were acquired by Yahoo! in August 2000 and integrated within Yahoo! Groups — itself launched in 1998. The eGroups phenomenon prefaced the explosion of social networks that we know today. The Internet is “the human voice rediscovered,” as The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual summarized ten years ago. The renewed interest in Social Media is the opportunity to re-read another important book, The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary where Eric Raymond expanded on his remarks at the Linux Kongress in Würzburg in 1997. These two books are echoed and updated in multiple interesting recent books, such as Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods, and Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business (1).

Social media are not a fad. Nobody will ever stop billions of voices. The July 2009 Ruder Finn Intent Index (1) provides interesting statistics: 76% of Internet users go online to discuss. When, on the other hand, you see that 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations and that only 14% trust advertisements, it’s clear that we have entered an era that will mandate a radical transformation of the way companies do business. While the majority of companies still cling to a top-down communication model with their potential customers, consumers trust the opinion of their extended families, their networks. Therefore companies now have to start learning how to reach the heart and mind of an increasingly hard-to-categorize “consumer,” an individual whose identity is spread across multiple personas. The rules are changing. We are quickly moving away from a world where access to companies by people is filtered by marketing departments and PR, to a world where this access is filtered by social networks. As a result, companies face serious challenges.

Twelve years ago IT departments didn’t want to hear about transactional websites. Therefore, e-commerce ended up in the lap of marketing departments. Today, social networks challenge marketers. They have to find qualified social media professionals to help out, which may not be easy when departments are stuck with antiquated criteria. They may hire consultants, but even the best consultants on the planet will have limited impact if corporate habits don’t change at the same time: the reality is that social media mandates that it becomes part of the company’s culture to empower and trust employees (how could unhappy employees safely converse with customers?). Marketing must start inside; every employee must turn into a potential evangelist. This may give a few headaches to traditional marketers, but the example of a few forward-thinking companies shows that the current trend is irreversible.

To scale their efforts, these companies need novel supportive technologies. Currently, numerous personal productivity tools are available. We are starting to see a few enterprise products capable of “listening to” customers. Yet, what is also critically needed is the ability to structure the way to talk to customers, as well as to measure the relevancy and the impact of the way you address them. This is precisely what ObjectiveMarketer, founded by Amita Paul, was designed to do. I am happy to work with her as an advisor — along with a friend of mine, Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of the most extraordinary online magazine rack, Alltop. Amita presented ObjectiveMarketer and I can only encourage you to try this remarkable product! (3)

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

(1) Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Mattersby Scott Rosenberg, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods,by Shel Israel and Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do busines by Erik Qualman are three books that I discussed in earlier posts. 

(2) http://www.ruderfinn.com/rfrelate/intent/intent-index.html

(3) More about ObjectiveMarketer. The product will be presented at BlogWorld on the Alltop booth (October 15-17, http://www.blogworldexpo.com)

“We invest in people…” is a phrase that entrepreneurs hear often from VCs and employees from corporations. What does it mean? Hard to know – or maybe, the actual content of the sentence depends on who is speaking.

OK, LinkedIn isn’t the whole spiel: For most people, you are your “background” and this “background” boils down to your résumé on LinkedIn. But a résumé is, by definition, limited: it is a summary. If Sergey Brin or Larry Page had sent a résumé to MSN, they would not have been asked to create the search engine of the future right away. Although they both had enrolled in the Stanford Ph.D. program, they were not “proven” yet. Who would have hired Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, or Bill Gates in key positions? The history of these iconic figures reminds us that what most people call “background” is only the foreground, a few degrees and a work experience that jump out to hiring managers and most investors. The end result is what we know: multitudes with “relevant” degrees and tons of “great” recommendations populate companies — small or big – and more often than not, these perfect recruits can’t make much happen beside ensuring business as usual and maintaining the status quo.

We all know that a great employee (or great entrepreneur) is more than a résumé. It’s a human being with a real background, whether you understand the word “background” as the software that is not displayed but is silently operating in the head and the heart of that person, or as the overall implicit or explicit setting or scenery in which a person places himself/herself and the vibes he/she transmits. This part is the fuzzy aspect of interviews — for better or worse, for both the interviewees and the interviewers, no matter how streamlined the interview process in a company may be or how well the interviewee has prepared. But how can people convey who they really are? And how can people know more about you? This takes me to a poll that I recently offered mostly via Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

What do you do if you are asked to bring up your Facebook page during an interview? After fumbling for a few minutes with the wording of my poll, here is what I finally offered: “A male hiring manager asks a woman to show him her Facebook page in an interview. What should she do: Agree; Refuse and see what he says; Ask why and then decide; Walk out of the interview?”

The idea of that poll came from a comment to a post by Renee Weisman, Keeping Your Online Identity Professional (http://www.womenco.com/benefits/articles/3608-keeping-your-online-identity-professional?page=1): “A friend just told me that at the interview, her hiring manager asked her to bring up her facebook page. He wanted to see the types of things she was posting as a way to judge whether she would fit in his organization!” 

Over 95% of the responses came through Twitter and the majority from the United States. After the first 100 votes, I noticed that percentages changed very little. Only a little under 12% of the respondents would immediately agree to bring up their Facebook page. I received multiple personal comments ranging from the right of having a privacy to the fact that our life is so much all over the Internet already that bringing up a Facebook doesn’t make that much of a difference. The poll was anonymous, but based on direct remarks, it is clear that people in their early twenties are the most open. One said: “Anyway, what 99% of people have on their Facebook is what 99% of the rest of the population also has. We have tons of pictures. It’s well known that other folks’ pictures are downright boring. So any hiring manager may be quickly bored as he/she goes through our galleries.” Another said. “My response would be ’sure.’ Can you bring your page too? You want to know whom you will hire, and I want to know more about who is hiring me and for whom I’ll work.”

The fact that over 50% say that they would “ask why and then decide” (they may end up agreeing for fear of losing a job opportunity in a tight job market), that over 25% would refuse and see what the hiring manager says, and that almost 8% would walk out of the interview is all the more striking as employers increasingly screen employees’ Facebook and MySpace pages: “Forty-five percent of employers reported in a recent CareerBuilder survey that they use social networking sites to research job candidates, a big jump from 22 percent last year. Another 11 percent plan to start using social networking sites for screening. More than 2,600 hiring managers participated in the survey, which was completed in June 2009.[1]“

My poll may not be “scientific, but if it is relevant, it’s clear that there could be a real discrepancy between the workforce’s state of mind and the companies’ hiring practices. If people feel forced to comply with corporate practices they do not like from the get-go, they might join companies only because they need a salary, not because they are sincerely motivated by the job – and strengthen a dangerous trend identified a few years ago showing that “less than half of Americans (47%) are satisfied with their jobs, according to a 2006 survey of 5,000 households (2006 survey of 5,000 households released by the Conference Board.[2] ” Economic recoveries are not simply a financial story: employees’ enthusiasm also counts.

Additional information in the CareerBuilder survey may add to people’s reluctance about bringing up their Facebook page: While ”Thirty-five percent of employers indicated that they did find information that caused them not to hire the candidate,” only “eighteen percent of employers reported they have found content on social networking sites that caused them to hire the candidate.” So, screening Facebook and MySpace pages appears to be primarily a way to exclude people. While it’s obvious that an employer will not want to hire people whose Facecebook and MySpace profiles  display inappropriate pictures, drinking, drug use, or badmouthing a previous employer, personal profiles do not seem to have a huge positive influence.

The advice of many career specialists is to encourage people to maintain a squeaky clean “professional” identity. Great, but this raises other questions, such as:

- Should your Facebook profile be a copy of your Linkedin profile with just a very slight personal touch? What is a “professional” family picture? How do you tell your friends to always make sure that they only take “professional” pictures of you?

- What is “unprofessional” besides a few obvious no-nos? Could the word “unprofessional” become a tote bag for all the things that a hiring manager doesn’t like about a candidate – and may say more about a hiring manager’s potential blinkers, culture, personal tastes,or ideology than about the candidate himself/herself? 

A few people asked me why my question was gender specific (A male hiring manager asks a woman to show him her Facebook page). In the poll, I did not ask respondents to indicate if they were men or women (maybe I should have). My response was that it was a real case. So think of this for example: A hiring manager cannot ask a woman if she has children, but can see it on her Facebook and can apply a still very common prejudice that this woman may not be entirely dedicated to her work. While it has become harder to openly discriminate, is it getting easier to do so tacitly?

Social media give a voice to a lot of new people – that’s obvious. Being in the Silicon Valley, I would have responded “Yes” with no hesitation to my own poll. Looking at the results, I had to think of the fact that the virtual world may also become a reproduction of the real world – eventually strengthen its shortcomings, its prejudice, but this time, under cover.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena… Godin rightfully reminds us that the creation of a tribe, and its goals, are independent from technology. Tribes didn’t appear yesterday and did not wait for the Internet era. Many of the examples of tribes selected by Godin can exist without digital support — and generally speaking the definition of a postmodern tribe is pretty close to definitions provided by anthropologists and historians. A tribe is first and foremost a connected group on a mission championed by a chief/leader. Therefore, the best technologies in the world are downright irrelevant if there is no leadership, and proficient facilitators that can be leveraged by a leader. This is where the Internet becomes such a powerful factor: “There are literally thousands of ways to coordinate and connect groups of people that just didn’t exist a generation ago.”

Meanwhile, it so happened that postmodern tribes in music, cities, and fashion (I myself explored the non-aligned looks of the late seventies/early eighties in one of my books of the history of fashion), emerged at the same time as digital tribes, even though there is no correlation between them. In the eighties, tribes are obviously part of the Zeitgeist, and since then, we have all witnessed the growing tie between analog and digital tribes.

Digital tribes have their own history. In the early eighties, efforts to optimize the interconnection of computer networks (initially started by RAND Corporation in the fifties to facilitate cooperation between its research teams in Pennsylvania and California) came to fruition, and the need to unify communication protocols led to the adoption of TCP/IP in 1982 — along with the definition of the word “Internet.” However, Internet or not, technology-enabled interconnections of geographically dispersed people had already started to expand beyond research organizations, reaching sundry university groups. The first real digital tribes appeared with the first NewsGroups: Usenet was conceived in 1979 by two American students from Duke University (Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis). Discussion groups multiplied: in 1981, Ira Fuchs created BITNET (acronym of “Because It’s Time Network”) for liberal arts professors, and by 1984, it was connecting over 150 campuses. In 1986, Eric Thomas, then a student at l’Ecole centrale de Paris, invented LISTSERV, an automated mailing list manager that enabled users to join a list without the need for human administration; this introduced the concept of a list owner.

Throughout the eighties, services proliferated. User forums sprang left and right on CompuServe, or you could favor the Apple route via AppleLink, for example. Then, in the course of the nineties, everybody progressively adopted the Word Wide Web, a system of interlinked hypertext documents using TCP/IP, that Tim Berners-Lee and Roger Cailliau had set up in 1989/1990 to enable researchers at the CERN to share information. The increase of Internet users expanded and modernized the concept of NewsGroup. That’s the key to the success of companies such as eGroups, started in 1997: eGroups had 18 millions users when they were acquired by Yahoo! in August 2000 and integrated within Yahoo! Groups — itself launched in 1998. The eGroups phenomenon prefaced the explosion of social networks: Friendster and Meetup created in 2002, MySpace, Linkedin, Rize, Tribe.net, Hot or Not, Yafro in 2003, Facebook in 2004. Dozens of others appeared at the same time and more later, from Advogato to Zoo.gr, including Ning, imeem, Last.fm, Classmates, Flixster Twitter, Ning, Odnoklassniki, Orkut, YouKu, Tudou, ou 56.com, Tagged.com, Plaxo, Habbo, BlackPlanet, MyHeritage… the list is nearly infinite.

These days, there are digital tribes for every possible domain of interest, addressing virtually all the aspects of who we are personally and professionally. As Michel Serres said in his lecture at Stanford (May 20, 2009), “our identity is the fuzzy intersection of all the places we belong,” and it is by no means a homogeneous reality – no more than we are an individual in the strict sense of the term, that is, an indivisible entity. Our “identity” is distributed across multiple environments, defined by multiple factors and scattered across multiple activities. The Latin word tribuere (of which the word “tribe” is derived) means to divide, share, assign, allocate (and the Latin “tribe” is the arrangement of people into groups). In short, each of us, to paraphrase Michel Serres, is the fuzzy intersection of tribes. This, by itself, is not new; what is new, though, is that each of us is now able to easily express this multiplicity via the Internet — to choose to belong to several tribes either as leaders or as followers. While it is true that tribes, as well as the motivations that lead us to create or join them do exist outside the digital world, the digital world has allowed people to express themselves more easily and freely (with the added bonus of pseudonyms) and to strengthen connections with peers in real time. Today, the Internet amplifies tribalism in huge proportions.

Part 3: The Convergence of Tribes: The Obama Campaign