I was a panelist at a dinner program held by the Washington Software Association on "Social networking More Popular Than Ever – But How Will That Translate Into the Business World?".

Panels can be hit or miss. Sometimes the audience is too small to get a diversity of questions, sometimes the panelists are not knowledgeable enough, sometimes the panels are too short to get meaty questions answered. This one was not any of those things. It was well organized, well attended (sold out at 250 attendees), good length at 90 minutes and had a good selection of panelists representing the start up to Microsoft and Google scale.

A few interesting topics cropped up. One was how painful it can be for new start ups to scale their infrastructure cost effectively. Peter Wilson, an ex Microsoftie who now works in Google Seattle, pitched the idea of having a platform on the web that start ups could build on top of, providing cheap storage, development APIs and more. Akin to Windows for desktop application builders for the web. This concept has been banded around by Microsoft and Google for many years but it is needed now. I wonder how long it will be before we can make this vision a reality.  

Another was about the unrealized potential of social networking for marketing. Behavioral targeting, turning users into viral brand advocates, identifying influencers and enlisting their help etc were all topics discussed. Again, these are great visions but no company really has made progress in a big way.

One topic that always gets me is just how many start ups there are competing in this category. Comscore measures 97 in USA alone that have enough scale to appear in it's Social Networking category roll up, with many more that haven't hit the chart yet. Will we be in a world where all of these can coexist as niches or will there be an inevitable fall out?

The main topic of the discussion was around business networking. I think people appreciated there were viable user needs to meet, but many wondered what the right business model would be in the long run. Can business social networks generate a lot of revenue or will they be more important for adding value to other services as features.

All good questions that make this category so interesting to be in. I have my opinions but always interested to know what others think.

This is a good widget for posting your LinkedIn profile on other websites, including Spaces. I've added it on the left hand column below the disclaimer on this Space. LinkedIn should have really done this themselves!

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LinkedInABox: Unleash Your LinkedIn Profile

This one was organized by Ali, who not only speaks a million languages, plays in a samba band, solves third order differential equations in his head .... but also snowboards. Needless to say he skis as well, but snowboarding is more his thing. So we all trundled over to Stevens Pass for a day on the slopes. It was a beautiful day and the snow was not fresh, but still soft.

We took a lesson with an absent minded instructor (he was too busy chilling, asking for tips and answering his cell phone) but Ali joined in to give lessons. Chris was an absolute natural, although he had snowboarded before. Charlotte was like an Energizer bunny falling and hopping but generally getting it despite being jetlagged from her boondoggle at 3GSM in Barcelona the day before. Pooja and I definitely struggled and I was sore as hell the next day, especially on my wrist from the falls.

All in all, another great day with the team. Thanks Ali for organizing and Charlotte for driving.

We missed Joost who had a catch a flight to Netherlands ... so the next one is on him!

Mike and Dare have great posts up about positive and negative marketing, comparing the recent ads by Apple and Microsoft. I've posted the ads here (plagiarism!), but its well worth checking out their posts for comments.

I personally think both ads are very characteristic of the two companies. Mich Mathews (our Marketing SVP) has pushed the concept of positive marketing to combat the negative ads thrown out by IBM last year. The People Ready ads show the power of technology to make things better, but IBM ads were all about scaring people. In that situation, I preferred Microsofts approach.

In this situation, I think Apple has taken the right approach and Microsoft has over hyped. I don't know a single consumer that wants to think about the operating system they use. They just want it to work and be convenient. They want cool applications to work on top of it. In pushing Vista as the "cool", we have not done enough to show the cool applications that can be built on top of Vista, which is what people really want. We have not done enough to deliver the two basic and most important messages about the operating system, it works and it's easy. Apple has heard consumers there and is messaging appropriately.

It will be interesting to see how the campaigns play out. It seems to be a classic case of "inside out marketing" where we are pushing something we want people to believe rather than focusing on what consumers want to hear.

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David sent me this picture from a 1954 edition of Popular Mechanics. Hopefully you can read the caption at the bottom stating that scientists believed that "thing" would be a home computer in 2004 but that most people wouldn't be able to afford it. We've come a long way!

But it does make you wonder how basic our visioning around mobile devices, nanotechnology or genetics for example could be. All of them seem a little extreme, until you look back at history.