So am I covering the DLD Conference in Munich for Technorati? We'll see: Nothing Much Happened (XVIII) In München Today

Tuesday evening became interesting in right about the middle of it. I had just come back from a weekly client meeting around 9 and sat down at the computer to clear my mail do my normal boring day end business. In the background I rotate the TV between the BBC, CNN, Bloomberg and CNBC - the only English channels available on my German TV. And in the background a commercial shows up, I don't know exactly for what, and they talk about a long list of speakers coming to Munich for a 'creative conference'. Hold on. Creative conference? That's my business! But the Internet takes over again and I'm back to my work without being able to understand what the commercial was actually for. I work with my back to the TV for a reason - nothing much worth watching, usually. I still have a cassette tape, and not a videotape of the film, "My Dinner With Andre", because the dialogue IS the entire film. It's just two guys sitting at a table talking. News TV is mostly the same. Talking heads.

But the commercial comes on again, I am cued by the sound, and I swing around sit and watch. At the end it says, www.DLD-Conference.com . What the heck is DLD? Never heard of it. Been in Asia too long. Sounds interesting. So I immediately go to the web. And pull up a site. Jeeziz. Because Jesus is the only person not speaking apparently - and the speaking list is not only impressive, it's extensive. Nearly 150 actuaries in Science, The Arts, Technology, Venture Capitol, a Nobel Laureate and even a Princess. Curioser and curioser. The DLD site describes the conference as such:

"DLD (Digital. Life. Design) is a three-day experience gathering 800 entrepreneurs, investors, philantropists, scientists, artists and creative minds from all over the world. With global diversity in attendees and an interdisciplinary perspective of digital, media, design, art, science, brands, consumers and society, the conference is known as the European forum for the creative class".

So I immediately go to the registration area of the site. But I am told summarily, like the bouncers at P1 will tell you, that I cannot come in. Registrations are closed. What next? And why are they running a commercial on national TV promoting the event and then not letting anybody in once we do what 'direct response' advertising wants us to do, which is 'respond'? Who knew?. As I am writing this, the commercial continues to run on CNN, one day later. Why might that be?

But whadayawant in advertising? Logic? I have been a Vice President at Leo Burnett in Chicago and was even sent to Asia by Michael Conrad, a very nice German and I can tell you, logic had very little to do with a lot in that business. I was the man available on the day they needed a man available in Asia, and off I went. My CV had little to do with it either. It was simply just good enough to not have killed the deal. Advertising and logic belong together sometimes like the words Army and intelligence.

As it turns out, the social networking site Xing, here in Germany, is a sponsor, and I know a few folks up there. Maybe they can help me do a work around. Letters to Xing. Type, type, type. I am a horrible typist. Next up. Brain freeze.

After that, Technorati. I had registered as a writer for Technorati last summer and been accepted but never written a thing. Why? Because basically, I do better on my own and most of my stories are not big news events. To write for another site, you make no money, do a lot of work, and are subject to editorial killing just like a regular job. So why do it? I can publish what I want, do what I want, and get a small but high level readership all on my own on most days. And as opposed to a lot of bloggers out there, I can do that - and get read no matter what I choose to write about. Why? I don't know exactly why. When there's no money involved, it just works that way. I choose my audience and they choose me.

But this instance was different. Here was a story that not only was I interested in, but one that Technorati would actually be interested in as well, and I had received an email from them just last week that encouraged all of us writers to "do more". Why? Because writers were not submitting content to them like they thought they would. Why? Because nobody wants work for free. I had turned down a speaking engagement last year with the Saigon Digital Marketing Conference for the same reason. The sooner this Web 2.0 animal figures that out, the better. There's a not a world of 'citizen journalists' just sitting around waiting to be published for nothing. No, we all work for a living. That's how we eat.

But Technorati should be interested I thought. I am in Munich, and it just makes good sense. I had just written a series called "wHAT's wRONG wiTH mY sOCIAL nETWORKING?" And this conference seems to have the answer to that question in that it brings creative people and Internet development people together. So off to Technorati I would go. A letter to their Executive Editor and a message back in just a few minutes. His response to my query on their need for a writer and stories on the event? "Go for it!".

And that was all the approval I needed - but sorting through the DLD website here in Munich would not be near as easy as getting the go-ahead from a publication based far away in San Francisco. A visit to DLD's contact page gives you two of those impersonal email addresses - you know the ones that say info@website.here or press@website.there - and then a visit to the 'team page' gives you a flurry of nice B&W photos of people doing certain jobs and another page to click on for what is described as 'detailed contact information'. A click on that and guess where you go? Right back to the first contact page with the same two anonymous email addresses. Hmmm. I eventually went to Xing, DLD's corporate partner in the conference, and was able to send personal notes to people who seemed to be directly involved in the production. No response from that quite yet.

So where I stand right now is in having a publication to represent but still needing approval from the conference and no, no matter what happens, I will not be paid, but I'm sure I can schlurp coffee and bag a few scones for breakfast. The interest here is in the quality of the presenters and the mix of personalities - the chance that real ideas may be proposed and even moved forward in an atmosphere where old media and new media could certainly do a lot more in each other's benefit than they might sometimes believe. Hubert Burda, below, has made that a mission. Scientific thought processes, sociological thought processes, artistic thought processes and business thought processes all strewn together for a few days will surely produce more inspiring writing than I might be able to do at home on my own as I did last year for a few conferences in Vietnam.

And should I not get a press pass, there's always the option of covering it as Hunter S. Thompson covered the Roxanne Pulitzer divorce trial, Gonzo style. Thompson, finding the courtroom barred from reporters, simply grabbed the transcripts he could from grocery carts full of them wheeled into the courthouse hallway, and retreated to a nearby pub to watch the trial on TV and interview other pub patrons on the goings on of the trial - but with this not being a drug infused, high profile, sex scandal, I can't imagine that option being particularly effective - or nearly as entertaining.

So now you wonder - what's that funny little graphic that leads off this story? That is my own personal DLD Molecule. Or in this case, the personal Molecule of Infinite Wisdom Consulting. The way it works is that you type the letters of either your name, or your company's name into the DLD Moleculator on the site and it runs it through a little algorithm that determines the shape. I like how in our case, there are lots of diametric converging lines, but that the overall direction of the mark produces one straight and clear line, right down the middle, pointing up, mind you. That in many ways, is how creative businesses should go - examining many opportunities and options, but still headed up towards a single goal. Neat. I though this was neat.

Last night I stayed up until a fairly insane hour of the morning reading all, and I did read them all, of the nearly 150 bios of speakers and panelists for the event. Here are just a few that would be memorable for me and Technorati readers: (Click to see full bios on the DLD site)

Aaron Koblin is an artist specializing in data visualization. His work takes social and infrastructural data and uses it to depict cultural trends and emergent patterns. Aaron's work has been shown at international festivals including Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, OFFF, the Japan Media Arts Festival, and TED. He received the National Science foundation's first place award for science visualization and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Currently, Aaron is Technology Lead of Google's Creative Lab where he helped to launch Chrome Experiments, a website showcasing JavaScript work by designers from around the world.

David Kirkpatrick, longtime senior editor for internet and technology at Fortune Magazine, has written for two decades about the computer and technology industries, as well as the impact of the Internet on business and society. His book, entitled "The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World" will be published by Simon & Schuster in the US June 15, 2010. The book describes Facebook's history and how this newly-dominant Internet force is changing behaviors across societies worldwide. He maintains a blog at facebook.com/thefacebookeffect.

Dr. Hubert Burda is Chairman of the Board and Publisher of Hubert Burda Media. He is President of the Association of German Magazine Publishers (VDZ) and co-founder of the European Publishers Council (EPC). He set up the Hubert Burda Foundation with a view to promoting interdisciplinary exchanges on future trends. Hubert Burda also founded the Burda Center for Innovative Communications at the Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel.He has been awarded numerous prizes and distinctions for his achievements in publishing and business, including the European Print Media Prize and the Gold Medal Freedom of Speech of the European Association of Communications (EACA).

Although best known for founding Wikipedia.org, Jimmy Wales has also set up the Wikimedia Foundation in 2003 and co-founded Wikia, Inc., in 2004. Recently, The World Economic Forum recognized Wales as one of the "Young Global Leaders" of 2007. This prestigious award acknowledges the top 250 young leaders across the world for their professional accomplishments, their commitment to society, and their potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world. Wales also received the "Time 100 Award" in 2006, named one of the world's most influential people in the "Scientists & Thinkers" category. Wales received his bachelor's degree in finance from Auburn University and his master's in finance from University of Alabama.

As the leader of the Mozilla Project, Mitchell Baker organizes and motivates a massive, worldwide collective of employees and volunteers who are breathing new life into the Internet with the Firefox Web browser and other Mozilla products. Baker received her BA in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley and her JD from the Boalt Hall School of Law. Her law career included working for Sun Microsystems and Netscape. Baker has been the general manager of the Mozilla project since 1999, helping shape the license under which Netscape's source code was released. As Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, Baker continues her commitment to an open, innovative Web and the infinite possibilities it presents.

After serving in the U.S. Marine Corps, and after his studies in Utah, Harvard and Cornell, John Naisbitt worked for IBM and Kodak. In 1963 he went to Washington where he became the Assistant Secretary of Education to President Kennedy, and Special Assistant to President Johnson. Since the global success of Megatrends and the 10 books that followed, he has traveled around the globe several times a year and has spoken to almost all the major corporations of the world. He is the recipient of 15 honorary doctorates in the humanities, technology and science. He and his wife divide their time living in Vienna, Austria and in Tianjin, China, where in 2007 they established the Naisbitt China Institute at Tianjin University.

Jonathan Harris makes projects that reimagine how humans relate to technology and to each other. Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, his projects range from building the world's largest time capsule (with Yahoo!) to documenting an Alaskan Eskimo whale hunt on the Arctic Ocean. He is the co-creator of We Feel Fine, which continuously measures the emotional temperature of the human world through large-scale blog analysis. After studying computer science at Princeton University, he won a 2005 Fabrica fellowship and three Webby Awards. He has given talks at Google, Princeton and Stanford Universities, the TED Conference, and at two hippy forest gatherings. His projects have been shown at MoMA (New York), Le Centre Pompidou (Paris), and have appeared on CNN, NPR, BBC, and Bhutanese television.

Reid Hoffman was LinkedIn's founding CEO for the first four years before moving to his role as Chairman and President, Products in February 2007. While CEO, Reid built the company to over 9 million members and profitability; Linkedin now has over 50 million members worldwide. Prior to LinkedIn, Reid was Executive Vice President of PayPal. At PayPal, Reid was in charge of all business relationships: business development, corporate development, international, government relations, and banking/payments infrastructure. During his tenure at PayPal, Hoffman was instrumental to the acquisition by eBay and was responsible for partnerships with Intuit, Visa, MasterCard and Wells Fargo. Reid also has held management roles in large technology companies, including Fujitsu Software Corporation and Apple. Currently, in addition to LinkedIn, Reid serves on the Board of Directors for SixApart and Mozilla Corporation (Firefox).

The Italian mountaineer and explorer from South Tyrol, Reinhold Messner, often cited as the greatest mountain climber of all time brought his sport to new heights. He is renowned for making the first solo ascents of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen and for being the first climber to ascend all fourteen "eight-thousanders" (peaks over 8,000 metres above sea level). Messner has crossed Antarctica on skis and the desert Gobi. Messner is the author of at least 63 books. From 1999 to 2004, he held political office as a Member of the European Parliament for the Italian Green Party. He co-founded Mountain Wilderness, an international NGO dedicated to the protection of mountains worldwide and dedicates himself to the Messner Mountain Museum.

I first heard of Reinhold Messner from a Ben Folds album cover. A few weeks ago someone had referred me to Jonathan Harris' website related to a job that we were doing, and we even traded a few emails this week. What an interesting life I have sometimes. To be able to come face to face in the line of my work with many of the people who shape my work. In many cases, I get to hire them and in some other cases we might become friends. I often tell students and those needing a little mentoring to make their dreams big - not to skimp on the fantasies - but also to make them real. Real enough just just get a little bit of it every few years or so. This breeds hope and hope, eventually breeds success.

My job now is to get through to the conference and speak with those who cover press. Had I heard about this earlier, I might not be in a time crunch now. Or had they advertised this earlier, they might not have had to put up with my silliness at this late date. I'll keep you posted.

For more on digital marketing and social networking see:

Xing vs. LinkedIn: Round II
Trial and Error: The New Normal
What's Wrong With My Social Networking? Xing vs. LinkedIn I
Low Tech Germany. Who Knew?
Advertising People and Blogs
How to Write the Best Blog in the World
What If Gutenberg Had a Blog?
If Blogs Are Free Does That Make Them Worthless?
Detri-Viral Marketing II: The Top 10 Social Media Blunders
Bright Lights, Big Internet and the WWED
Saigon Digital Marketing Conference Successfully Avoids Plumbers Convention
A Tale of Many Marketing Conferences
Detri-Viral Marketing I: How Web 2.0 Can Go Against A Brand
Marketing Predictions for 2009
Barcamp Saigon 2008
"Ignore Everybody" is Born: A Plug for Hugh MacLeod
Are the Bloggerati Missing the Market? Asia has Risen,
Into the Gapinvoid - Web 2.0 Social Networking Born 20 Years Ago

wHAT's wRONG wITH mY sOCIAL nETWORKING I: Well, visually it sucks for starters...

Part I in a II part Series: For Part II click here.

Please take a few minutes with this video. (Pause the podcast in the sidebar first) This is Kseniya Simonova a Ukrainian artist who works in a sand painting technique using a large light box and a pre-recorded soundtrack - but what's interesting, or what I found interesting here, is not the technique particularly but how she is able to stimulate emotion and visual learning throughout the eight minute film. Look how the audience reacts to her work as she paints. Their vocalizations. Understand how you went into the piece and how you forgot your logic and your bearings about two minutes in - because you didn't know what was going to happen next. That's what happens with visual communication through media. It engages our suspension of disbelief. It takes fantasy and makes it part of our reality for the time being. Because reactions to visual stimuli are part of our natural intelligence, not something we've learned so much as something we've acquired - More nature vs. nuture in a visual sense. Alphabets and organized aural communication are learned and nurtured later - but nobody needs to tell us what the meaning of 'scary bear' is or how to cry or scream at the sight of it. That's natural, at any age - as is your reaction to Keseniya's hand painted story. That's our visual learning gene kicking in. So when are the social networking sites we all use going to start taking advantage of this innate human sense we have and are actually yearning to use, the same as we use everyday in real life? And why are they largely ignoring it in what they all trumpet as their "attention to user experience"? Have they forgotten that our eyes can be used for so much more than reading - and that it's a whole lot more than me just having a Star Wars skin as the background to my homepage? Or are they just at a stage where it's a natural progression to go there next. The latter is where I think we are now.
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"Ever­yone is born crea­tive; ever­yone is given a box of cra­yons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the cra­yons away and replace them with books on alge­bra etc. "

That's Hugh MacLeod from his book, Ignore Everybody. Last year Hugh managed to hit both the Amazon and Wall Street Journal Top Ten Lists for business books with a book of what? Well, cartoons for at least 1/2 of it, and smart ideas about creativity for the second half. And do you think anyone in New York was looking for a business book with cartoons in it before Hugh? Well, of course not, but he hit a nerve that had probably been long under-tapped in that his book managed to combine both words and pictures in a way that spawned new ideas - and a valuable following of readers and social participants as well.

You see, Hugh's book isn't just a book, it's more just the tip of an iceberg of a philosophy and a business that includes active participation in his blog and his web community of "Crazy Deranged Fools"- many of whom buy art and wine and other things that are part of Hugh's total product mix. I've known Hugh for twenty years now and I can tell you, he has never been able to work in just words or pictures alone - he has always required both. And I think a great many of us are the same way. It's just that the Internet, or at least the social networks have not found the value in addressing us that way yet. Now we want our crayons back. We want to be able to communicate in the way that is most natural to us. We want our communication and indeed our networking to be well, easier, more comforting.

This whole train of thought for this post started for me weeks ago and it has occupied a number of A4 sheets of discarded printer paper of which I use to keep errant notes for blog posts although many of the ideas have been drawn from my life in communications and percolating for years. This iteration began by seeing Mark Pincas on The Charlie Rose Show, followed by Director, Tim Burton discussing a retrospective of his artwork at MoMA in New York. Mark Pincas is the founder of Xynga games and for those who don't know, that is the company responsible for the Mafia Wars and FarmVille games, most popularly seen and played on Facebook. But that was not what interested me, nor the supposed 15 billion dollar market in virtual games of which he said 1-2% of the players actually pay for. What interested me, is that these are primarily 'visual' concepts, as is online Poker - and I couldn't think of very much that was visually driven about the primary social networks I have been involved in. I'll get back to this idea a bit later because I think I know why.

So I needed to take a look again and see what these networks were missing. (For those who will wonder why I haven't included Second Life in this comparison consider this: When the US, Japan, most of Europe and China open embassies on SL, I'll consider them part of the same market. Until then, their level of suspension of disbelief is just a boatload higher than most people are willing to go for a real social network. You wanna hire my Avatar? I didn't think so. But apparently you can sleep with it. More of a pure game, albeit a social game but way far out of reality's scope here both in concept and excecution.) On the left side of this page, you'll see screenshots of my Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter and Friendster accounts. And on the right side, you'll see the leadpage shots of the website from probably the most awarded advertising agency in Germany, Jung von Matt. Notice any difference? I thought you might.

Starting with Facebook, it has always perplexed me why the thing needs to look so boring. Blue, like Windows classic blue. Icky. Sure, you can run around the program and get special 'skins' from third party suppliers, but as I understand, they either have a short shelf-life, as Facebook keeps changing their codes, or only work for your computer screen whilst everyone else sees the same boring blue screen they have always seen - so your skin change is not communication at all, just some king's new clothing for you while everyone else gets to see you naked - as usual. And all the other third-party apps? Most of them run as stand alone things and don't integrate into your workflow in the system. Oh, they'll send you a ton of crap later but visually they don't play nice with your homepage and require you to gotto 'apps' and activate them. Clumsy, I think. Much like the way they handle groups. Why don't I get a cool little audio/visual ding-dong when someone adds something to my group (the ones I moderate)? Could be insightful.

Moving along to LinkedIn and Xing (I categorize these together because they are both 'business' networking sites), we get - well, surprise - more blue or teal and green in Xing's case, just a slight rotation of the colour wheel. Now here we mean business and it's pretty obvious from both sites lack of personal colour choice that we shant be messing with business by painting it like a Grateful Dead album cover or god forbid Daft Punk or some sort of other electronica rot like that. No siree. In fact, a quick Google for LinkedIn skins or Xing skins gives you well, nothxing. And neither site offers anything in the way of helping yourself - so forget it. If you don't want to work for IBM, go away. Big Blue rules here as well.

But how much sense does that make when the agency on the right handles work for Mercedes, Nikon and Deutsche Post? Is the post office cooler than a business social networking site? Maybe. But it needs to be remembered that business takes many forms and many shapes and colours as well. Just think about all the logos and companies you already know about and how different they all are. Companies all have their own language of visual communication - and even Jung von Matt knows that. The work they do for their clients doesn't look at all like the leadpages on their website. That's just their way of representing themselves in this particular instance. And that's how it should be. Visual communication, as opposed to verbal or written communication, is like the thousands of characters in the Chinese alphabet compared to the 26 characters in the Roman alphabet or 24 in Korean. It's a world of pictures out there to the Asians and those quicker to realize and capitalize on that will be further in their user community's minds than the next guy. With Twitter, Xing and Friendster on the rise, Facebook is looking like the next guy, and already blocked in China.

Next up Twitter. Need I say more than 140 characters? By restricting our BS, Twitter has allowed us to create 140 character novels, post pictures and even have clever little skins and widgets that personalize and communicate along with all the terse verse we can compose. But we get to do it with a wee bit of style in keeping with their wee bit of philosophy. Fair enough.

And finally, Friendster. Never heard of Friendster? Well 100 million other people have and a lot of those people are Chinese. Compared to 90 million on Twitter, 55 million on LinkedIn and a growing but not quite there yet 8 million or so on Xing, Friendster is on the cutting edge of visual communication in social networking, but that really is not saying so much. The site was relaunched recently with intensified visual themes to more widely appeal to an Asian audience. They feature a ton of custom skins and decorations for your own pages - and like MySpace, everyone gets to see them. I've spoken before of how living in Asia can make the web a third world country when moving back to the west because the sheer activity, not to mention rocket ship bandwidth and speed in Korea and other fast ramping Asian markets, but so much because of the history and tradition of visual communication.

Remember, Chinese characters are pictures - not letters that mean sounds or syllables like other modern alphabets and whilst Korean 'Hangul' is a mathematical and phonetic construction, Korean newspapers still feature Chinese characters interspersed with their more modern (circa 1500s) alphabet because Koreans still know what a limited amount of Chinese characters mean and relate to them intrinsically. And since the Chinese invented paper and the Koreans preceded Gutenberg with movable type by 78 years in 1377 with Jikji (Which was originally individually cast Chinese Characters) these people know a thing or two about the written word in pictures - and getting it out. Think also of the Japanese fascination with Pokemon and it's later storm through a western kid's vernacular and you'll get where I'm going. Pictures speak louder than words. And mostly to the audience to which the social networks will be making all their money off of for the next ten or twenty years - unless holographic or 3D networking wipes it all out in 2 or 3 years from now ... Continued in the next post or click here for Part II.

For the entire series click here:

wHAT's wRONG wITH mY sOCIAL nETWORKING? I: Well, visually it sucks for starters...
wHAT's wRONG wITH mY sOCIAL nETWORKING? II: How Creative Direction can build Social Networks
wHAT'S wRONG wITH mY sOCIAL nETWORKING? III: Nothing Much Happened In München Today VII

Xing vs. LinkedIn: Round II - a Macro to Micro and back to Macro Again Overview

Readers to my earlier post entitled "Low Tech Germany! Who Knew?" will be aware that my initial experience with the Xing network was reasonably less than positive. Joining in early December I found the sign-up to be a rather taxing experience and then once I got it up and running it just sort of sat there. Good news abounds since then though as Xing was just beginning to release a number of upgrades to bring it fully out of what I had described as Web 1.0 and into full Web 2.0 performance. But more than that, I was intrigued that Xing was up for any length of time with as much success as they had had considering the clumsy interface I encountered, so I decided to do a bit of homework. What follows, begins with a Macro overview of both services and then works into a Micro look into daily functions and overall usability from a user standpoint - with a pretty good understanding of where Xing is headed, at least, technically. And then back to Macro for the finish. So let's get started. For our Macro view I'm going to use a lot of data from Wikipedia, which yes, I know, I know, could be dodgy but it's some of the most current I've found at this time.

- Type: Public, (AG)
- Founded: Hamburg, Germany (2003)
- Headquarters Hamburg, Germany
- Members: 8.3 million (Source: Xing)
- Key people Dr. Stefan Gross-Selbeck, CEO, Ingo Chu, CFO, Burkhard Bluhm (Executive Board), Lars Hinrichs ...(Founder)
- Revenue: € 25.09 million (QI-QIII 2008) $36.15 million USD (Source: Wikipedia)
- Website: Click under "Xing Me" in the sidebar
- Alexa rank: 268 (Source: Alexa)
- Type of site: Professional network service
- Registration Required
- Available in: Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, ..Japanese, ..Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish





- Type Private. Funded by Greylock, Sequoia Capital,^[5] Bessemer Venture Partners, the
..European Founders Fund and Bain Capital Ventures.
- Founded: Mountain View, California (2002) Launched 2003
- Headquarters: Mountain View, California
- Members: 53 million (Source: Wikipedia)
- Key people: Jeff Weiner, CEO previously a Yahoo executive. Founder Reid Hoffman,
..Chairman of the Board. Dipchand Nishar, Vice President of Products.
- Revenue: € 11.77 million (QI-QIII 2008) $17 million USD (Source: Wikipedia)
- Website: Click on "LinkedIn" in the sidebar
- Alexa rank: 42 (Source; Alexa)
- Type of site: Professional network service
- Registration Required
- Available in: English, Spanish, French and German

So let's go through the big points: #1) Xing is a public company and LinkedIn is private. Basically, this makes Xing a whole lot more interested in generating income now as opposed to later with stockholders and quarterly interests to satiate. #2) Both sites were launched in 2003, so that makes them essentially the same age - in virtual terms. #3) Here's where things seem to go strongly in LinkedIn's favor - Members: Xing clocks in with a self reported number of members of 8.3 million members whilst LinkedIn sports over 50 million - 5 times that of Xing. #4) But let's not jump to profit conclusions by looking at member numbers. If LinkedIn has 53 million people and took in revenue of €11.7 million that (in a rough, not financially very accurate calculation) would be around 8 and a half cents € for the entire year or for the Americans out there, less than 12 cents for the whole year. Xing by contrast with just 8.3 million members brought in €25.09 million adding up to around 30 cents € for each member or 43 cents American per member - but wait, "All the members didn't pay, right?", you say. And that's exactly right. It's estimated that fewer than 10% of Xing members pay for a premium membership, but the point is, that they do pay, 6€ per month or so but that's coming from well less than a million members and it makes the site, very, very profitable. (Income from partner agreements and recruiter accounts on either site is not publicly available so can't be broken out here.) #5) On Alexa rank, LinkedIn pretty much clobbers Xing but with the financials already discussed, I don't think anybody at Xing is going to be breaking a sweat. We'll go through some more financials later and you'll see that Xing is certainly not afraid to spend a bit of that for growth. With a steady paycheck coming in, who wouldn't, considering the growth available in the market? The Alexa charts here indicate web activity for both sites - one for a few months and the the other for two years. LinkedIn is, on the left, the big wavy blue line and , on the right, the jagged red line - Xing is the rather tepid line at the bottom of both charts. I'll come back to these charts later but suffice to say, if I had a chart for financials, it would look somewhat like these two - that is if you reversed the Xing and LinkedIn captions. Xing is basically kicking LinkedIn's butt on the money front. #6) Our last big point here is in languages served. LinkedIn clocks in with 4 and Xing with 16? Yep, you read that correctly. Now I've been able to work through Xing pretty well in English but I will say that since it's German based, and well over 1/2 its members are from Germany that not everything works perfectly in English - for instance when you need help or want to sign up for another service - the forms are in German. How Xing manages the sixteen and counting little networks it currently houses inside their one, still not very big network, will certainly be something to watch - and they have an office in China. I'll get to that later as well. Could they breach China's Great Fire Wall?

So that's the Macro. In a nutshell LinkedIn is a helluva lot bigger in terms of members than Xing, but Xing is infinitely more profitable than LinkedIn. In this business scenario, who would you like more to be? Methinks a little bit of both of these guys would like to be the other. But I'm going to focus more on Xing today because I'm in Germany and it's my current fascination. So with LinkedIn pretty much kicking butt on membership how do you go about competing? Yes, both services charge for a premium membership (and I'm currently getting my Xing premium for free because I signed up enough new members) but LinkedIn is just way over priced for their premium services and I have a network large enough (Over 300) that I don't seem to need much of what they offer. Xing on the other hand, already has a loyal subscriber base, so how can you grow that? Enter OpenSocial.

Let's get a little more Micro. OpenSocial is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social network applications, developed by Google along with MySpace and a number of other social networks. It was released November 1, 2007. For all us non-geeks what does that mean? It means all those little apps that let you see a block of Facebook updates, or your friend's Tweets or latest blog posts - all in real-time. It enhances the user experience. And this was what Xing was missing when I checked in just a month ago. I had become reasonably addicted to all this seemingly senseless activity but when I first checked into Xing it didn't have any of that, and I missed it. To quote Xing's founder, Lars Hinrichs, "it is ostensibly more important for people to know what their contacts are doing than to follow the latest news events from around the world.” LinkedIn started to integrate OpenSocial APIs in 2008 so what did Xing do? They bought a site that already had them.

And even more Micro. Now for the princely sum of about $4 million in cash and stock, and a performance-based earn-out valued at between 0.5-2.5 million Euros payable over three years, I'd guess that Jason Goldberg wasn't too unhappy parting with his baby, SocialMedian, considering that I'd never heard of it and probably you haven't either, and from what I've seen it looked pretty much like a Digg or Mixx clone. But at USD $4 Mil and Euro change? Things could suck a whole lot worse.

But what Xing seemed to buy in SocialMedian, much more than just a working package of OpenSocial APIs was a real motivator in Jason Goldberg. from New York. As founder of Jobster, he had said that Monster.com had a "crap product" in their user experience (and he's right) but what's even cooler was that that comment got to YouTube, and you know what? It looks like he's exactly what Xing needed. If you're the challenger, you need to have a little piss and vinegar. The David vs. Goliath story is only a good one if you truly believe that Goliath is an asshole. If he's Shrek, it's just no fun. So for the whole of 2009, Goldberg worked in Hamburg with Xing implementing his self-stated "Ship it" mentality. "Make mistakes, ship it! That is not always in line with the traditional way of doing business in Germany, yet the team embraced it and lived up to it. I think it’s important to have an environment where people feel they can make mistakes; that’s absolutely critical for innovation. You also need to ship it, to get user feedback and improve your product according to the users’ wishes. If there is one thing I am most proud of regarding my year at XING, it’s how the XING team embraced ship it.", he said in an interview about his time at Xing.

And now to teeny tiny micro. All that hard work done, and it does seem that Goldberg was a real motivator, but I didn't see a bit of it when I signed up for Xing in early December of 09. Tons of work done in the back room and little of it visible out front, where it basically counts - a bit like dropping the ball right before crossing the goal line. For instance, the function for finding my Xing contacts based on my Gmail account never worked properly - and when I went through listing all my other social network accounts, there was no mention of their new Twitter interface or how to put it on my homepage. (Also no way to put my LinkedIn account, and I think this is a huge mistake. Rather than regard LinkedIn as competition Xing should realize that heavy users will have both accounts and at least canibalize their bigger brother for those of us who want them both. There's 45 more million qualified customers to hit. Easily.) Only later, after seriously digging into the site, and really searching features out, did I find out how to use them. Xing's homepage needs to do a lot better job of pointing out new features and encouraging usage every time I sign in. Things should be a whole lot easier than I found because I'm on everything from Digg to Mixx to Twitter, Facebook, Linked in and a few more and Xing's been the hardest of all for me to negotiate as a new user.

When Nintendo was my client at Leo Burnett, I learned a very important thing from their programmers. In that business it is said that when a new game comes out, way beyond the graphics or the storyline, that a kid needs to feel a real level of success inside of 15 minutes with it, or you have lost him forever. I can't imagine that most business people have much more patience than a twelve year old boy. Something to keep in mind, certainly. And how to do that? Well since I'm in that business, I don't think I want to give all my best consulting away for free so I'll just give a hint: 65% of the population are visual learners. Currently, I don't think there's a single social networking site (save for possibly MySpace) that makes good, productive use of this fact. I think there's a real opportunity here.

And now finally, way back to Macro. Having painfully negotiated Xing and gotten over 40 contacts, a number of groups and all my bells and whistles working, there's one thing that Xing does better than LinkedIn or Facebook ever have - and that's making real contacts. The deluge of party invites I get, and the actual events, even the shitty ones, are more than I've ever seen from my plethora of networks. Here's a network that actually works. That needs to be communicated much better. And that's where we get to the real bottom line. Scroll back up to those two graphs and look at the one that's a two year graph, and see how Xing, with the line way at the bottom, takes a tiny spike up at the beginning of 2009 (presumably due to the multi-million Euro purchase of networks in Spain and Turkey) and LinkedIn just goes through the roof. That's called buzz. And Xing could use a whole lot better buzz than I found when I arrived in Germany, their home country, and now my home country. Once they do that they'll get their bottom line buzzXing as well.

Post Script: I posted this late morning yesterday, Tuesday, and by mid afternoon had a note from staff at Xing and by evening a Twitter follower from LinkedIn. Maybe this blog's Google page rank moving from a 3 to a 4 over the weekend is having some effect. Think so? Nah...

For more on digital marketing and social networking see:

Xing vs. LinkedIn: Round II
Trial and Error: The New Normal
What's Wrong With My Social Networking? Xing vs. LinkedIn I
Low Tech Germany. Who Knew?
Advertising People and Blogs
How to Write the Best Blog in the World
What If Gutenberg Had a Blog?
If Blogs Are Free Does That Make Them Worthless?
Detri-Viral Marketing II: The Top 10 Social Media Blunders
Bright Lights, Big Internet and the WWED
Saigon Digital Marketing Conference Successfully Avoids Plumbers Convention
A Tale of Many Marketing Conferences
Detri-Viral Marketing I: How Web 2.0 Can Go Against A Brand
Marketing Predictions for 2009
Barcamp Saigon 2008
"Ignore Everybody" is Born: A Plug for Hugh MacLeod
Are the Bloggerati Missing the Market? Asia has Risen,
Into the Gapinvoid - Web 2.0 Social Networking Born 20 Years Ago