Como encontrar en Linkedin los grupos mas numerosos(+500K)? - al hilo del anterior post-

Es ponerse a cacharrear y salen las cosas....asi que mi recomendacion; cacharrear.
Efectivamente hay grupos de +100.000 como decia en el anterior post, y de + 500.000 contactos (en ingles)
Fijar los parametros de la busqueda como os lo indico en la imagen (amarillo a la izquierda)...y salen.
Si quereis saber los españoles, pues eso, indicadlo en la busqueda

Read more >>

Cómo saber en Linkedin el numero exacto de Contactos a partir de +500 ?

Seguramente te habrá ocurrido cuando accedes al link de "contactos" de una persona, aparece "+500". ¿pero cuantos tiene realmente?

Ten en cuenta que ese "+500" le aparecera al que tenga 501 o 18.000. Al seguir el link veremos su listado de contactos "paginado" y abajo las opciones de ver siguientes paginas. Será tan sencillo como contar el numero de paginas  y multiplicarlo por 25 que son los contactos que muestra por página.

 La calidad de nuestra actividad en las redes sociales aunque no se mide solo por las cantidades, sí que es un buen indicador. La importancia de este numero no es solo el numero de contactos directos que tenemos, sino las posibilidades de contacto "indirecto". Como se ve en mi ejemplo, con 6.300 contactos directos, indirectamente tengo visibilidad sobre + 16 Millones de personas.

¿y esto para que sirve?
Cuando hacemos una busqueda sobre Linkedin, solo se nos devuelven los resultados de los que estan en "nuestra red" (hasta el 3º grado).

¿Atajos?

En la version Premiun (de pago, muy recomendable para aquellos vinculados a la venta, Dueños, RRHH, buscadores de empleo,...) tenemos un añadido. Nos permite buscar contactos (y visualizar) aquellos que comparten grupos con nosotros aunque no esten en nuestra red (3º grado).

¿y?

Asi a priori, si ingresamos en un grupo de +100.000 personas (que los hay), repentinamente tenemos visibilidad y posibilidad de contacto sobre esas +100.000 personas ... y sobre todo de añadirle a nuestra red (uno de los requesitos que a cumplir para invitar a alguien a entrar en contacto puede ser estar en el mismo grupo)



Read more >>

The Complete Guide To Freemium Business Models

The idea of offering your product or a version of it for free has been a source of much debate.

Pricing is always tricky. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs don’t give it enough thought. They will often copy the pricing strategy of similar products, base their decisions on pompous statements made by “experts” or rely on broken rationale (we worked hard so we should charge $X).

Free is even trickier and with so many opinions about it, we thought it would be refreshing to take a critical approach and dive deep into why some companies are very successful at employing the model while other companies fail. We’ve looked into economics academic papers, behavioral psychology books and strategies that worked for companies to come up with the key concepts below.

The Law of Marginal Cost

Pricing plays a huge part in competing for customers. Here’s an economic law that holds almost as much truth as the law of gravity: in a perfectly competitive market, the long-term product price (aka “market clearing price”) will be the marginal cost of production.

Guess what? Because of declining hosting and bandwidth costs, for most Internet products the marginal cost today is practically … zero.

In other words, if the cost to serve a customer (support aside) is zero, the long-term price of the product in the market will be zero (because of competitive pressure).

An Experience Good

At the core of the “Free” models are the products or services being offered to the customer. Most Internet products or services fall into the definition of an Experience Good: a product that needs a period of use before the customer can determine the value they can derive from it.

A good example is Dropbox. Consider Drew Houston’s words: “The fact was that Dropbox was offering a product that people didn’t know they needed until they tried.”

There are plenty of academics who looked into the pricing of Experience Goods. In 1983, the Economist Carl Shapiro wrote a fascinating paper about this subject. His conclusion was that since customers tend to underestimate the value of a product, the optimal pricing for an experience good is a low introductory price which is then increased when the customer realizes the value of the product.

In some cases, a customer might overestimate the value of the product. In that case, the optimal pricing strategy is to charge as much in the beginning or to lock in customers with long-term contracts.

This is why customers are reluctant to buy when someone asks them to prepay for a service or product or sign a long-term contract.

Hence, the introductory price is a signaling mechanism. The conclusion?  A low entrance price signals that you are confident that your product will create value for the customer.

The Psychology of Free

Much has been written about the Psychology of Free. Two books that looked specifically into the subject are “Free” by Chris Anderson and “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely. Putting it simply, Free is an emotional hot button that immediately reduces the mental barriers for the customer. Free makes people think that they have “nothing to lose” since many ignore time as an investment.

From this perspective, free is a huge accelerator of adoption. The flip side of this is that after using the product for free, it is very hard to get the customer to start paying for it. This phenomenon was broad enough to get its own name: “The penny gap”—the hardest part is to get your customer to pay you the first penny. This is why it is so critical to choose your premium features wisely.

Decision Factors

If all that is true, it seems like Free (or Freemium) is the answer. Well…. not so fast. The decision is definitely not easy. Here’s a basic framework to help you make a more informed decision. A word of caution though: for every complex problem there’s a simple solution … and it’s wrong. The framework is helpful as a thinking tool but there’s no magic formula.

Here’s a set of questions that you’ll need to ask yourself:

1.    How big do I want my company to be? If you are looking to build a lifestyle business that’ll make you $8,000 a month and you have a good product, you can probably do without Freemium. If you want to build a dominant company that has a substantial market share, Freemium can help you accelerate adoption.

2.    What is the value of the free users? Across all successful Freemium companies, there is a way of making money or saving money from the free users. Either by saving on marketing costs (Dropbox) or by making money from ads or data (Pandora, Evernote, Mint) or both. If you cannot turn your free users into savings in marketing costs or revenues from third parties—figure out how!

3.    What is the cost to serve free users?  This is a critical aspect of the model. If you spend a lot of money and/or time servicing free users, you are going to lose a lot of money. The cost of servicing free users must be lower than the dollar value they provide.

4.    How big is my market? “The easiest way to get 1 million people paying is to get 1 billion people using,” says Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote. Free adds another conversion step on your way to revenues. You need a big market to have enough people who will be paying you at the end of the day.

5.    Is there value to one customer from other customers using the product? This will determine how many new users the free users will refer. There are three levels of value:

1.    Inherent value – You can use Skype only if the person you talk with also uses Skype. You can share a Dropbox folder only with other Dropbox users. In this case, Freemium can be a powerful strategy.

2.    Added value – You wouldn’t want to be the only user of LinkedIn. You derive value from other people using it. In this case, Freemium can help you gain traction if you use an effective invitation mechanism.

3.    No value – You don’t care if someone is using Evernote or not. The only reason for one person to tell another about the product or service is if they think it is awesome.

The Types of “Free”

One of the key factors in making Freemium work is the structure of the offering. What is it that you offer for free vs. charge? There are different types of free strategies. Let’s take a look at the popular ones:

1.    True Freemium – Give a version of the product for free and charge a fee for the other versions. There are two ways to go about this:

1.    Value based – The most successful type of Freemium strategy. The more a customer uses the product, the more value she derives, the higher the switching costs are, and at some point she’ll hit a usage limit and convert to a paying customer. Evernote and Dropbox are beautiful examples of this.

2.    Characteristic based – For example offering the product for free for one user (so it is based on company size for instance). Let’s think about a B2B application. If I’m a freelancer, I will use the application forever and I will never have to upgrade. If I’m a 3-person company, I can’t add more users and try the application for real and hence might not get to the point where I see the value in using it.

3.    Free Product for a Cross Subsidy  - Give one product for free and charge for complementary products.

4.    Time Based Free Trial – Give a free trial for X days and start charging once the trial ends. The issue here is figuring out what X is. On one hand you want to create a sense of urgency, on the other hand you need the customer to see the value in the system.

Open Source as a Free model

Lately I’ve seen many entrepreneurs confuse Open Source with Free so I thought it would be helpful to make the distinction. An open source model can definitely accelerate the distribution of your product and is a viable free model. It has two main advantages. You might get developers to contribute to your product (see WordPress). By doing that you can accelerate the development of your product. The other advantage is that you give customers peace of mind as they have control over the source code. You can then make money from selling pro features or value added services. There’s a critical distinction here and that is that your code is out there and anyone can start a company to commercialize this code. Bear in mind that it is very hard (often impossible) to reverse a decision to open-source.The Last Bit And The Secret To Success

There are many factors to consider when you are evaluating whether to use the Freemium model or not. However, there’s one last secret that I didn’t share with you. During the study, while looking at the successful Freemium companies, a pattern emerged. They all had phenomenal products. All of these decision factors are useless if the product or service you are offering is nothing short of amazing. If your product is not creating great value for its users, no tactic in the world will make Freemium work for you.

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Uzi Shmilovici, CEO and founder of Future Simple, which creates online software for small businesses. The post is based on a study done with Professor Eric Budish, an economics professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. It also includes ideas and comments from Peter Levine, a Venture Partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and a professor at Stanford GSB

Via techcrunch.com

Read more >>

+500 ofertas Empleo en Linkedin (España)

Convencido! todavía se le saca poco partido a Linkedin y sobre todo a esta sección de Empleo, tanto por las empresas como por los candidatos

Las imágenes siguientes (basadas en los distintos filtros que nos permite Linkedin) nos pueden dar algunas lecturas sobre las ofertas

·          actualmente hay 511 ofertas en España,

·         la mitad metidas ayer mismo (cercanía con el arranque de septiembre)., sin ir más lejos, Accenture ayer metió 154 de múltiples perfiles

·         Son las grandes empresas (Accenture, Microsoft, Indra, Michael Page,…)las que más lo usan

·         Por funciones laborales, la tecnología se lleva la palma, seguido de consultoría y ventas

también podremos desglosarlo por sectores y ubicaciones

Moraleja: aprovechemos las cosas buenas de las redes sociales (que las hay) , que cosas para distraernos (malas??) y generarnos ruido (en muchas ocasiones "deseado") tienen de sobra

·        

Creado con Microsoft OneNote 2010
Un lugar para todas sus notas e información

Read more >>

6 tips to help you best utilize LinkedIn for your job search

Job Seekers

LinkedIn is the best tool to help you land that dream job. Follow these tips to help you best utilize LinkedIn for your job search.

Ensure your profile is complete and up-to-date

Your LinkedIn profile is your chance to showcase your skills and talents and help the right people and opportunities find their way to you. As your professional representation online, you can set it to be discoverable through the millions of searches on leading search engines and on LinkedIn.
Be sure that your profile is up-to-date with your latest work information and you have a well-written summary that touches on your experience, interests, and where you’d like to go. Start updating your profile now.

Users with complete profiles are 40 times more likely to receive opportunities through LinkedIn!

---

Your connections should represent your “real world” network

When your network represents those you know and trust, you can utilize them for recommendations, and ask for introductions into a job or opportunity that you are interested in.
Your first step is to Import your address book and add those trusted connections who are already on LinkedIn. To complete your network, invite the contacts that are not on LinkedIn to join

Use the address book importer to import your address book directly from web-based email clients such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail, or use the Outlook address book importer.

---

Search on LinkedIn Jobs

LinkedIn Jobs has thousands of job listings for each category. You can search using keywords, title, company, and location to find the perfect opportunity for you.

Leverage the elements on your profile to help make yourself stand out. Getting recommended and having a strong network builds your professional credibility and helps you get hired.

---

Message Key Network Contacts

Use an “inside connection” to help get you access to company or job you are interested in. When you browse to a job listing on LinkedIn Jobs, you can see which of your connections are at that company. Leverage these connections to help you find the right contacts at the company you are interested in.
You can also use the Advanced Search to find a user by keywords or companies. You can directly contact users through inMails or request an introduction through one of your contacts if you have common connections.

Another great way to use LinkedIn is to research your recruiters or interviewers. You can learn more about their background to have an edge over the other candidates.

---

Demonstrate your Expertise on LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn Answers is one of the best places on the web to share business knowledge. You can ask and answer questions on specific subject matter.
By demonstrating your expertise on LinkedIn you earn recognition that helps you build your credibility.

The more points of expertise you gain, the higher you appear on lists of experts.

---

Use the JobsInsider Toolbar.

Once installed, the JobsInsider toolbar integrates into your web browser, so when you are viewing a job listing on an external job site, you can automatically see your inside connections at that company.  Download the toolbar today.

These inside connections can help you through informational interviews or by introducing you directly to the hiring manager.

via http://www.linkedin.com/

 

Read more >>

How LinkedIn used Node.js and HTML5 to build a better, faster mobile app

This morning, LinkedIn launched its gorgeously overhauled mobile app. We’ve already told you all about the new features, but for developers, the most exciting part is what’s going on under the hood.

The app is two to 10 times faster on the client side than its predecessor, and on the server side, it’s using a fraction of the resources, thanks to a switch from Ruby on Rails to Node.js, a server-side JavaScript development technology that’s barely a year old but already rapidly gaining traction.

Also, the development time was unusually fast.

“It was fast by all standards,”  LinkedIn’s mobile development lead Kiran Prasad told VentureBeat. “I’ve worked at startups and big companies like Yahoo, and yeah, it was fast.”

Part of the development speed was due to the fact that the team knew ahead of time exactly what needed to be built. “We really, soundly knew what we wanted to do at the beginning,” said Prasad. “To build a product when you have two years’ worth of data on user behavior makes it a lot faster.”

Using HTML5 for the mobile web & native apps

One part of the development speed was due to the way the team used HTML5 in the web app and reused a bunch of the same code in the native applications for iOS and Android.

“There’s this battle between HTML5 web apps and native apps. But we’ve interspersed HTML5 in the native app, where web-based content excels. The things that are hard to do in HTML5 are a scrolling infinite list, so we went native with that.”

The reuse of HTML5 code across all three applications (mobile web, iOS and Android) will speed up iterations of the app, too. “We can grow our feature set more quickly without having to do a whole new client build,” Prasad said.

In addition to HTML5, the team also used a handful of lesser-known free and open-source tools, such asBackbone and Underscore, in developing the apps.

“The way our mobile web app works is it’s all rendered on the browser side. The value of that is you send less data back and forth, so it’s much faster.”

Also, the app is insanely lightweight. “If you take our entire app and you combine all the framework pieces and zip it, it’s under 50K,” said Prasad.

“We don’t use the browser’s caching system, so once you’ve brought the app down, unless we’ve changed something in the app, the most you have to download is 1K. So especially for international users, it’ really important to not make a bunch of extra traffic.”

To speed up performance on the mobile web app, Prasad told us, “Connections are all stored locally, also for speed and so if you’re offline, you can still access them.”

How Node rules the roost — unless you’re crunching data

We quizzed Prasad about his team’s use of Node.js, the Joyent-sponsored, server-side Javascript technology that’s been all the rage among many startup-centric developers we know.

“On the server side, our entire mobile software stack is completely built in Node,” said Prasad. “We use a ton of technologies at LinkedIn, but for the mobile server piece, it’s entirely Node-based.

“One reason was scale. The second is, if you look at Node, the thing it’s best at doing is talking to other services. The mobile app has to talk to our platform API and database. We’re not doing massive data analytics. Node showed us huge performance gains compared to what we were using before, which was Ruby on Rails.”

The improvements the team saw were staggering. They went from running 15 servers with 15 instances (virtual servers) on each physical machine, to just four instances that can handle double the traffic. The capacity estimate is based on load testing the team has done.

Still, Prasad admits Node isn’t going to be the best tool for every job. “We have a recommendation engine that does a ton of data crunching; Node isn’t going to be the best for that,” he said.

But with a technology so relatively new (Node didn’t truly take off until mid-2010), is LinkedIn concerned about bring a somewhat untested technology to an already at-scale app?

“There’s definitely that concern,” said Prasad, who himself has been using Node since January 2010, before he worked at LinkedIn.

“We did an analysis of a number of platforms — Ruby, Node, Java, Scala. We’ll continue to use it and see how it does. That’s how we’ll make our technology choices. In our culture, we’re encouraged to try new technologies. No one’s going to shoot you in the head for trying something new.”

On the other hand, getting to play with a trendy new technology is like candy for most developers, and Prasad said the opportunity was definitely a hiring incentive. LinkedIn brought some V8 engineers on board, and the company’s Ruby on Rails developers converted

“If you look at the community of Node devs,” said Prasad, “there are a lot of transplants from the Rails world.”

To learn more about the bottlenecks and tech issues the team encountered while working with HTML5 and Node, stay tuned to the LinkedIn engineering blog for a series of technical posts.

via venturebeat.com

Read more >>

Google Launches Hotel Finder, Steps Up Travel Search Game

via Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

Despite the purchase of ITA, Google has yet to delve deeply into travel features beyond somebasic flight info. However, their most recently experimental tool, the Google Hotel Finder, may signify the beginning of the search giant's push into this niche.

What the Google Hotel Finder Is & How It's Different

With Google's recent trend to cut away all the unnecessary extra projects, releasing a new experiment means one of two things: an exception to the "only serious projects" rule, or that this is, in fact, a serious project. Certainly, Google has loaded their hotel finder with enough features that it can't be taken lightly.

What features? Let's start with the standard niceties.

Google made it easy to search for hotels (you just plug in a location name and ZIP code), and from there it's simple to thumb through the results. Each hotel page creates a collage of vital data that can be digested at a glance, and you can even use shortcut keys to flip back and forth between hotels. When you find a hotel you like, you can add it to a "shortlist" for easy access and comparison later on.

Then we have deep integration with Google Places. Images, reviews, rates, and key information for each hotel is imported automatically from Places to the Hotel Finder. Those who are promoting a hotel should pay special note: You optimize for Hotel Finder by optimizing for Places.

And last, and in fact best, we have the visual map. Take a quick look:

All the areas with the white highlights are popular tourist attractions, and the blue lines around them are automatically generated by Google. Your hotels are then pulled based on how conveniently they let you access said attractions.

Don't want to visit all the places tourists like? Or do you want to visit extra places? In either case, you can extend the blue lines to cover whatever area you please.

For the time being, Hotel Finder is available only for U.S. cities.

Fighting for the Travel Niche

OK, so the tool is pretty neat, but why is this tool important?

The simple answer is that this may be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to travel search features. While Google Places has built some nice travel-oriented features into its framework and you can pull flight schedules directly from the Google SERP, Google really hasn't done a lot when it comes to travel.

Bing, on the other hand, has. Since its release, Bing has targeted just a few choice area, with travel topping the list. If this hotel finder is really a serious project, it indicates that Google is ready to step up its game – and that likely means an airliner full of travel-oriented extras from Google in the coming months.

Read more >>

Perdidos en las redes sociales: ¿dónde prefieres compartir?

via Territorio creativo

Linkedin para relaciones profesionales, Facebook para las personales, Twitter para poderlas mezclar si lo deseas y Google+ para empezar a probarlo todo y con todos, de nuevo. Y falta por ver la red social de Microsoft. Buffff… Responder a dónde se comparte o se consume más contenido, dónde hay más usuarios o quién tiene más seguidores y por qué parecen ser hoypreguntas viejas. El problema del futuro (más para las marcas y posiblemente no tan grande) es que nadie sabe realmente por dónde irá ese futuro, pese a todas las intuiciones que tengamos.

Quizá la solución del mañana para las personas sea mucho más sencilla de lo que pensamos. Quizá compartir nuestras ideas, fotos o links sea tan fácil como elegir el botón de la red social donde queramos ‘colocarlas’, en todos los archivos y herramientas o aplicaciones, al 100%. Para los que pretenden influir de forma general (marcas, organizaciones, líderes, etc.) la cosa se complica un poco. ¿Apostamos por todas las plataformas? ¿Deducimos o analizamos dónde puede ser más rentable? ¿Debemos crear contenido más específico para cada una de ellas?

Podemos observar pequeñas pinceladas para no estar tan perdidos en el futuro. Matices para poner entre comillas porque si algo hemos aprendido de estos últimos años es que aún somos bebés en redes sociales (aún nos preguntamos por qué compartimos online), que las plataformas sociales influyen en parte de nuestro comportamiento (nunca he hecho públicas tantas fotos mías) y que, pese a todo, seguimos adorando las relaciones personales estrechas o cercanas (estemos o no a miles de kilómetros). Vamos a ver esas pinceladas:

Nos gusta probar todo lo nuevo pero también perdemos rápidamente el interés inicial por las nuevas redes o herramientas, sobre todo si no representan una gran novedad. Ese será el reto de Google: darnos la posibilidad de hacer algo nuevo, sea o no sea más sencilla de usar que Facebook. Tras las primeras semanas, el índice de crecimiento de Google + descendió un poco (¿lógico?) y aún le queda por avanzar, como revelaba un estudio de Experian Hitwise a finales de julio. En una encuesta a casi 5.000 usuarios un 7,5% aseguraba haber eliminado su perfil en Facebook tras haber probado Google +. Tristán Elósegui se lo preguntaba a los propios seguidores. La última cifra de usuarios en Google + de la que se habla llega hasta los 25 millones. Instagram tiene 5 millones.

Queremos gestión personalizada y eficiente de nuestras relaciones. Es fundamental para la adopción y difusión de una red social, sea más fea o bonita. Es lo que muchos pedían a Facebook y lo que parece el acierto de Google + con sus círculos. Queremos ‘limpiar’ bien nuestra red, llegar a optimizar lo que queremos consumir y lo que queremos compartir. Eliminar el ruido inútil rápidamente y no tener que leer durante 15 minutos un ‘timeline’ de Twitter para encontrar un link interesante. Hace unos días hablaba de ello Nova Spivack (de Mashable) en su blog. Yo aún también me pierdo en mis propios círculos.

Buscamos siempre contenido de valor y los usuarios cada vez más demandan de las marcas eso mismo. Los posibles compradores en las redes sociales siguen pidiendo otro tipo de marketing, alejado de la publicidad tradicional. Se volvía a subrayar en un reciente informe de Custom Content Council y, bien, eso las empresas que deciden apostar en internet lo saben, en su mayoría. Sin embargo, cuando hablamos de contenidos para los ‘smartphones’ habréis tenido la sensación al bajaros una aplicación hecha por una marca y probar sus contenidos que estos tenían muy poco valor.

Se crea lo que parece más complejo y defrauda lo que parece más simple de ‘meter’ en una app de empresa que parecía ofrecernos mucho más. Conclusión: eliminar app y gran pérdida de oportunidad. En una encuesta de HiveFire a ejecutivos, la mayoría tenía claro que los contenidos en marketing también requieren planificación, estrategia y manos expertas que los lleven a cabo. ¿Volvemos a preguntarnos qué es lo difícil de crear?

Os pido que compartáis vuestras sensaciones personales a la hora de usar hoy las redes sociales, pero también que penséis en cómo creéis que las vais a usar o deberían usarlas las marcas en el futuro. De momento, en Social Media Marketing lo importante es saber reaccionar, planear y ejecutar. No exactamente en ese orden.

¿Aún os sentís cautivos de la plataforma social y sus reglas? ¿Cada vez se parecerán más unas a otras en un ejercicio de normalización de lo que funciona? ¿O cada red social tenderá hacia una especialización? Lo único que tengo claro es que seguirán mandando los usuarios. Y eso es bueno.

Read more >>