Hacking LinkedIn's Paywalls (Part 1/2)

If there's one thing I've learned over the past couple years in the startup space, it's that most things that are core to top-notch products aren't done mindlessly. The second fact that I'm considering before posting today is that a friend who I respect a great deal told me that the smartest people in the Valley are working at LinkedIn. Given that, today I'm puzzled.

In a biz dev capacity, LinkedIn is one of the most important tools. Just straight stalking people. In that tomfoolery, the things you're driving for are people's names and contact info. LinkedIn knows this, so it tries to upsell me on a premium account by witholding people's last names on their profiles if I'm 3 or more steps removed from them, e.g. today I was doing some research and came across a Brittany G. In theory, LinkedIn has found a great monetization scheme. I need the last name, and I can't find it without paying them. Problem for them is I've learned several ways around LinkedIn's barriers.

Way 1
Without being too efficient, I could just Google Brittany G. and the position she held at whatever company, which is the information that's usually available to me. Low and behold, her name is Brittany Grouchmarxio. And, when I go to her company's site, I can get the email nomenclature (first.last@, or, as is more frequent in startup land, first@ or last@).

Way 2
My process was made even easier when I discovered that by clicking the first person that 'other people view when viewing Brittany G.' Let's say that person is Steve Buckwilder. By looking at the list of 'other people folks view when viewing Steve,' I'll see Brittany Grouchmarxio's name in its full glory. Mission accomplished in one click. Without leaving LinkedIn. Then rinse and repeat with an easier Google for the company name. Figure out the email nomenclature. Boom shakalaka!

My craftiness isn't LinkedIn's fault, but still. Why even put up the front? Why try to upsell me on stuff with SUPER simple hack-arounds? Is it just a convenience thing? Are people really willing to pay for that convenience? If so, that's amazing. And, if so, LinkedIn, I'd love to work with your data team because those guys are ballers for figuring that out.

Caveat Emptor: Data Oriented Marketing Has Limits

The first note here is that I'm a huge fan of analytics platforms and what they enable businesses to do. It's awesome to know that you can break down the behavior of all the folks visiting your site, signing up for an email list, etc and tailor your attempts to engage each group.

I've had a lot of experience riding the wave of a data engine's ability to predict things. numberFire is generally judged, and maybe misjudged, by the algorithm's ability to make a call on a future outcome. That call would help someone win or lose a fantasy football game or a bet. We would always get questions like "Did your system see Colin Kaepernick coming?" or "When Linsanity happened, did you guys know it was going to happen before it did?" Nope, and nope. Sure, after 5 games or so, we'd be able to get a pretty good beat on a guy. But, even then, we would have been totally wrong on J-Lin again - he flamed out when Mello came back and hasn't done a ton since.

Greg Satell contributed a great piece to Forbes that sums up what's going on here. People expect that because you have so much data, you're going to be able to predict everything, perfectly. The problem with that view is that it overlooks creative happenings or a certain moment of genius. Data tries to capture the happenings of the past as precisely as it can in order to give you a probability of certain events occurring in the future. Two things to keep in mind there:

1) At least at numberFire, we were dependent on imprecise mechanisms of capturing past behavior - box scores don't tell you everything you might want to know, but increased camera views coupled with unstructured data mining technologies are certainly helping with that. Google Analytics, Omniture, or whatever other technology you might use will have some bugs in it. Granted, the amount of information those technologies are able to capture about behavior on a website puts box scores to shame, but it's still a point to keep in mind.

2) If you're batting .600 (or for those of you less acquainted with sports, if you're right 60% of the time), you're making money, perhaps even a lot of money depending on how much you threw down and how directly correlated that is to ROI. Real talk, if you're winning 53% of the time in Vegas, you're making money. 53% leaves out 47% of circumstances in which you're totally wrong, in which something crazy happens that nobody, given current technologies, can call.

The point is this: data is great in most circumstances. Most circumstances, however, are not all circumstances. As a marketer, it's incumbent upon you/me to keep that in mind and not stop trying to think about what's missing, keeping an ear to the ground, keeping on thinking and not just computing.

Content Creators: Kings of the Marketing Castle!

Ever since numberFire saw its ability to engage and re-engage users increase exponentially through the addition of editorial content, I've been thinking a lot about the future for writers, musicians, actors, etc. These days, the creation of content for its own business purposes - its sale to end consumers in hard physical forms like CDs, DVDs, etc - seems like a dwindling concept. There are 4 factors compounding that problem:

1) No Viable Payment Replacement: iTunes can't solve the 50% decrease in sales the music business has seen over the past decade. People used to buy entire albums. Unless you were Michael Jackson, Tracks 1 & 2 would hit the top 20. Tracks 3 & 4 in the top 100. Tracks 5-16 were usually garbage outtakes. Despite that, people paid $16-20 for a casette... (Damn you Camelot Music!). At $.99/track, with 2 consumption worthy tracks, you cut that to 12.5% of the money labels used to make.

2) Glut of Professional Content: You can get professionally created content streamed to pretty much any device you want.

3) Glut of Indy Content: Sites like HuffPo, Bleacher Report, and YouTube glorify amateurs and raise them to historically reserved distribution levels.

4) Better Indy Content: If Macklemore and the music business is any indication, the free stuff will improve dramatically over the next few years anyways.

So, why would the consumer pay? He/she probably won't, or, if they do, not very much. I'll argue that when Google Fiber either gets implemented or puts enough pressure on Time Warner/Verizon/Comcast to reinvest in faster infrastructure, movie theaters will go the way of record labels. Home speakers are awesome. Huge, clear displays are cheap. Indy film producers already expect to being really poor for the rest of their lives. The only thing missing is fast load speeds for high def video.

So, if content doesn't make money on its own, what else can it do in a social-capitalist regime? Enter Brian Halligan and Hubspot. Content as marketing isn't a new concept. It just feels way more important today than it was a half century ago. Ad creative has been awesome since the Mad Men. The difference though is that, today, there are many more content channels than there were in the 60's when TV was just getting going with "I Love Lucy" having 70% of all TVs in America tuned in. There are also exponentially more people in the audience trying to connect with brands in different languages with different customs across all these channels. Finally, all those people are way smarter than consumers in the 60's. They have so many resources to call you on your BS marketing drivel, so you're going to actually have to have a good product and authentic representation. This is what's going to rescue content creation.

Obviously, I say this cautiously because content creators won't want to sell out to corporate causes. Thing is though, as I've been able to reason through numerous conversations at Blue Bottle's various locations throughout San Francisco and Williamsburg (Brooklyn, we go hard...for coffee), the problem content creators have with corporations is the view that they lie to advance economic purpose. I'm not sure that's going to fly anymore, at least in as mass a way as it has in the past. Audience resources and demands for authenticity are already impacting the way brands are positioning themselves. So, there's going to be a lot of good, real writing, video, and audio created in support of commercial ends. And, each commercial outpost will probably have to have dedicated specialists conveying its voice across channels because of the real time conversation required. So, as long as companies are making products, content creators should be able to find work! Rejoice!

Paul Krugman's Bitcoin Argument: A Response

I'm not saying Paul Krugman is an idiot. I'm also not endorsing Bitcoin. The only argument I'm making here is that if his most recent ideas on Bitcoin are to be taken as a representation of Krugman's views, he's proven himself at least partially ignorant.

Bitcoin, like many early technologies is just an adoption test right now. Who knows if it will gain mass use or not. If it fulfills a need for a wide enough array of people, it will. That's the basic way in which tech works.

Krugman's argument against Bitcoin, however, is 1) a statement of obvious facts upon which the Bitcoin framework works and 2) ignorant of the way in which technological advances and adoptions have made the world operate.

"...money...is useful only to the extent that other people use it...I guess you could make [the case that we need a new form of money] if the money we actually have were misbehaving. But it isn’t."

1) Obviously people only use money if other people use money. Krugman stating that sketch markets for drugs, weapons, and human trafficking are using Bitcoin because of the distinct advantages it provides those audiences shows that people are using it. Maybe not a huge amount, but, like I said, it's an adoption game right now.

2) Just like people who wanted to watch pornography using VHS before anyone else or the same people demanding online video before anyone else, sketchy markets have proven to often be precursors for mass technological adoption. Magazines weren't really broken in the early 80's, and VHS wasn't really broken in the late 90's. Easy transaction and consumption paved the way in dramatically changing those sketchy markets and the world at large.

I don't defend or endorse people selling drugs, weapons, and humans online. However, the truth is that they're major economic players who will need a way to transact with Bitcoins for more basic goods in the real world. If they want to change the way currencies work to suit their needs, it could stand a pretty good chance of happening.