Latest Buzz from JigSaw

Dear Jigsaw Insiders,

Well, June 4th has arrived and I can finally spill the beans as to what Jigsaw has been up to for the past few months. Today Jigsaw announced the Declaration of Data Independence in the face of the traditional data companies that charge for company data. Put simply, we are giving away every one of our 1 million+ company profiles for free.

As an Insider and Jigsaw expert, you may at first react with a “big deal” type response, since you know that all of our company profiles (which come complete with company URL, HQ address, main number, revenue, industry and number of employees) have always been readily available on the website and included in a contact list delivery.



Watch as we declare
Data Independence Day


However, according to a project we’re calling the Open Data Initiative; now anyone can download any or all of the company profiles they wish for direct import into the corporate CRM system of their choosing. We might not have quite as many companies as the Data Dinosaurs (yet!), but we’re betting that we have plenty to run your prospecting and marketing efforts. And besides, what other data company out there can compete with free?

This is a win for all segments of the Jigsaw Community. Individual users or small companies can now populate their CRM systems with the same number of target companies as big companies. Large Companies get the benefit of the updates from the almost 500K Jigsaw members. The Play and Free members benefit from a large influx of new members interacting with their data, gaining royalty points and increased accuracy of the contacts. Jigsaw still makes money selling specific contact info, subscriptions and cleaning and maintaining the CRM databases. Only the dinosaurs lose, forced to leverage their relationships and distraction techniques in order to continue selling a product for a price that the market will no longer bear

Check out the revolution at www.jigsaw.com. You can see the full length video of Jim and me, dressed as the founding fathers, as well as see the CRM partners and other information about the Open Data Initiative.

Best,

Garth
VP of Community and Co-Founder
garth@jigsaw.com
650.235.8383

Hmm I wonder what JigSaw is up to

Huge proponent of Jigsaw and HTC has been a member for a long time.

I wonder what they are up to with this announcement.
Dear Jigsaw Insiders,

Since we started leaking hints about the big Jigsaw announcement on June 4th, I have received an unprecedented amount of calls from members and friends of Jigsaw trying to get the inside scoop. I still have my (rapidly fraying) muzzle on, but Marketing has allowed me to send you all this one minute preview of the promotional video that Jim Fowler and I taped a few weeks ago on Haight Street in San Francisco. Despite my fears to the contrary, the full length (3 minute) video actually turned out to be pretty funny and still gets our point across.

Please do us a favor and don’t steal our viral thunder by forwarding the trailer- save that for the finished product on June 4th, when it will be available for download on our home page. If all goes well, we might double traffic to our site- and get many more people to start contributing to Jigsaw like you have! Thanks so much for your support of Jigsaw to date and for joining us in our quest to make the data dinosaurs obsolete!

Best,

Garth
VP of Community and Co-Founder
garth@jigsaw.com
650.235.8383

List of Social Networking Sites and resources for Social networkers

Other Social Networking Sites

1. 43 People : social meeting
   people online
   
2. Asoboo : social networking
   with events/places (japanese)
   
3. Blogtronix : social
   business networking ; blogging
   
4. Blue Dot : social networking
   site
   
5. Bolt : video/photo/music sharing
   service
   
6. BrightFuse
   : business networking
   operated by CareerBuilder
   NEW
   
7. Cingo : social family-based
   networking
   
8. Collective X : group
   calendar, discussions, email, sharing
   
9. Couch Surfing : CouchSurfing
   is a worldwide network for making connections between travelers
   and the local communities they visit.
   
10. dodgeball : social networking
    with mobile phones
    
11. Doostang : social professional
    networking by invitation only
    
12. Facebook : social student
    networking
    
13. Faves :
    Build your own Social Network based on templates NEW
    
14. Favorville : social
    networking doing favors
    
15. Friendster : social
    networking
    
16. hi5 : Find friends in your
    hometown or other parts of the world; upload music, videos, photos
    
17. HooversConnect:
    Business, Find the people you want to meet through the people
    you know
    
18. iKarma : social business
    networking with recommendations
    
19. imeem :
    social network where millions of fans and artists discover new
    music, videos, and photos, and share their tastes with friends.
    
20. Jambo : social networking
    
21. Jigsaw : business card
    networking
    
22. Jookster : social networking
    
23. Jyve : skype networking and
    tools
    
24. Kaneva : social networking
    service
    
25. Konnects:
    Make connections: Locally, Internationally, in your Industry Post:
    Events, Classifieds, Jobs, Questions
    
26. LightStalkers :
    social journalists network
    
27. Linkedin : social business
    networking
    
28. Map Mix : mapped social
    networking
    
29. Meetup : localized interest
    group meeting
    
30. MyMapSpace : social
    networking site with maps
    
31. MySpace : social networking
    
32. Ning : Create
    a Social Network site of your own
    
33. openBC : social business
    networking
    
34. opinity : social networking
    with testimonials
    
35. Orkut : social networking
    
36. PeerProfile : social
    info / bookmark / photo sharing
    
37. Popist : social networking
    site
    
38. Rabble : mobile phone blogging
    and social networking
    
39. RecruiterRockStar
    : A Talent Generator and Social Network for Candidates and Recruiters
    NEW
    
40. ShoutCentral : social
    networking site; blogs, photos and fun
    
41. TagWorld : social networking
    + blog + music + storage
    
42. the black stripe
    : social photo sharing
    
43. The Well : Welcome to
    a gathering that's like none other — remarkably uninhibited, intelligent
    and iconoclastic.
    
44. Tilika : online calendar
    
45. TownCrossing : online
    communities
    
46. Tribe : social networking
    service
    
47. XING : business
    social networking; powers relationships for the world’s
    business professionals
    
48. Ziki : social networking
    site
    

 

By resending invitations on Linkedin you can add a lot of connections!

Real quick wanted to add another tip on how to get more connections on Linkedin. And FYI I'm over 5100 now so these techniques work. That's about 1000 connections in the last month and I've only sent 250 invites out. And another 100+- resends.

Old Invites can be a Gold Mine.
Yea I know you already sent them one invite but somehow it either got ignored or lost or forgotten.

I started going through my old invites and resending the invites to people and they started accepting them. Many replied back and stated they didn't know how they missed the first one, so something at Linkedin might be loosing invites or people aren't clearing out their invite box regularly and it gets archived/lost.

So go to your invitations then go to your Sent invitations.
Sort by click on the Status column you will see a bunch of invites that have a "blank" status. Then RIGHT click on each "subject line column" (this is where is says "Invitation to connect on LinkedIn" or "Join my network on LinkedIn") and open in it up in a new tab or new window. Then I click on a tab and scroll over the person's name and it will pop a little java window with a summary of their profile, I double check to make sure their are not already on my first level and click the Resend Button. I then type in a more personal note as to why I want to connect and hit send.

If there are any invitations without an email address or LI says they can't be delivered you can Withdraw the Invite. But, from what I've noticed, "Withdrawing" the invite does not necessarily put it back in your pool of available invites.

Once you go thru all the ones with "Blank" status, use the page numbers at the bottom and find the ones with a "Sent" status and do the same thing, Right Click and Click the Resend button and write a more personal note then hit Resend.

This will change both the Blank and the Sent status to a Replaced Status.

After a few weeks (3-4) you can go back thru all the Replaced and Resend again. I'm not sure how many times you can send someone an invitation before Linkedin won't allow you to send any more and my guess is that if after 2-3 Resends they still have accepted they either aren't going to ever accept or are just not active on Linkedin.

Also be fore-warned that if someone gets let's say 2 invites from you (one original and one resend) and they IDK both invites then Linkedin counts both IDK's against you. And with the 3 strike rule they will put your account on restriction.

Reference: An IDK is and response by the person receiving the invitation of (I Don't Know "Sender's Name") which not only declines the invitation but also puts a negative "mark" on your Linkedin profile. After 3 IDK's you will no longer be able to send someone an email without knowing their email address and Linkedin will not release additional invitations to you after you use up your initial 3000 invites. On a first offense of 3 IDK's they ask you to read the rules and agree to abide by them via email. Second offense they won't release more invites until you re-read the rules and "clean up" or explain your IDK's and third offense it's off with your head:-) just kidding same thing, you have to re-re-read clean up the IDK's and they won't release more invites to you =-( But the third offense they give you a much sterner warning and threaten to take away your account etc etc.

Jeff Weidner
HTC Research
925 313 9005 X 200
jeffweidnerlinkedin@gmail.com

And join my group on Candidate Pipeline Development(TM) on Linkedin at http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/44169/3ED8F804D9C7

A reply to someone ticked off at getting IDKed from another user on Linkedin.

This was part of a long rant so I'll cut it and keep it anon to keep relevancy:

WHY JOIN A GROUP if you don't want to connect with the members?????

[Name]
I understand your frustration as I've had the same problem too. I even had invitations that I sent to people I know, declined and IDK'ed and IDK's from people I sent invites to from Mylink500 and themetanetwork lists(LION's) and they are supposedly Open Networkers. I've had my account "frozen" several times from LI as it's their policy to freeze accounts (they won't give me more invites until I clear up IDK issues) when you hit 3 IDK's

But what I realized is this;
A) I don't need their "stinking" invites to grow the network:-)(said in my best NY accent which is pretty good considering I'm from Jersey)
B) As a Sourcer/Recruiter I know why I'm on Linkedin, to get names, most people who join Linkedin have no idea why they joined or what they can do on it. That would take an effort on their part.
C)Once they join they don't know what or how to do "anything" let alone accept or send an invite. They don't read the fine print and take into consideration what will happen if they IDK your invite or decline your inmail they just do it cause they are inundated with junk and spam in every other site they've joined and don't need any more so they go into defensive mode and IDK or delete or mark as SPAm anything and everything.
D) Recruiters and especially those living in and around Silicon Valley give other people way too much credit as to other Linkedin Users level of understanding about technology/social networking "basic" rules of etiquette etc.
E) People just don't have time to "go figure it out" and tend to skim through for immediate relavance rather than "wasting" time trying to get to the bottom of it.

So to overcome all this. Keep it short, keep it sweet, keep it relavent and only send invites to those you know will accept:-)

Jeff Weidner
5000+
jeffweidnerlinkedin@gmail.com
I accept all invites, forward all requests, respond to all inmail, send lists of contacts for free for all candidate requests and have a tendency to exagerate and become a bit satirical from time to time.

Follow up to Building a Linkedin Network.

I was asked a few questions so here is the follow up.
1) When is it big enough? Dunno haven't found out yet, I certainly do not see any downside from have a huge network. We find tons of candidates off Linked in every day. As HTC is a research firm it has become extremely valuable to us. I can't/won't day exactly how many candidates per week we are getting from Linkedin but I can tell you it is significantly more than it was a year ago. We have completely revamped our search processes internally in the past 6 months. We have found it to be much more cost effective to first locate a canddiate or two (Manager let's say) on Linkedin and the pull the group via phone or check a candidates profile before phone screening for a specific client. I can't say it's replaced any of my other techniques but I can say it's augmented them and made them much more efficient. But Linkedin isn't perfect either. There is a lot of "bad" and "old" information on there. Linkedin may make a better financial model for a research firm as opposed to a recruiting firm or staffing department. Also ,we just don't sell the names we find off Linkedin, we actually use it as a starting point, an easier way to get additional names out of the target.

2) It take about 5 hours a week to manage. I don't actually search for candidates as I have a team of people doing that. I did not pay for Linkedin until I needed another way to add connections. In March I purchased the 1 year subscription so I can add people using inmail and referrals etc. up until then I did it all for free so the ROI was infinite. Even with the paid subscription at $400 a year it paid for itself in the first hour after I bought the subscription.

3) I joined Linkedin about 4-5 years ago and did nothing until Sept 2007. Up to that point I think I had about 100 first level contacts, so a majority of my network has been added since the beginning of the new year. At the end of Dec 2007 I had about 2000 first levels and today I have 4300. Everyone's network will be different but at 1000 I had 2.5 million total, at 2000 I had 6 million, at 3000 approx 8.5 million, and at 4300 as of this am I have about 10,390,000.

I think the rest of your post really revolves around whether you should spend the time to build it or not. Will Linkedin implode? Will you loose value in connecting your candidates to your clients to your vendors? I worried about the same thing at first and then realized it was a moot argument at this point. One can not predict what will happen in the future but I know my company has benefited tremendously from having access to the information on Linkedin and next we're going to conquer Facebook and Myspace and on and on. Should you build your network? Overwhelmingly my answer would be Yes. Why cause the risk of not building and being left behind is too great, because my network also grows and we're connected on our first levels:-) and because it's a great resource of previously unavailable information that grow exponentially every month. By not building your network do you think that will stop your clients and candidates from connecting to others the only thing you'll do is loose contact with them. I could go on and on with examples but suffice it to say in my opinion as far as social networking goes, if you're not riding the wave now you'll be sucking on foam later on down the road:-) And if you only add 25-50 new connections a week that's still a HUGE network after 1 year!

Jeff Weidner
HTC Research Corp

How to build up your Linkedin network

OK I've been getting a ton of people asking me how I built my network on Linkedin up to 4200+. I thought I would share some of my secrets on how I'm getting so many (which is relative) invites (about 100-150 per week). Though I didn't realize they were secrets.

So here's my basic routine.

FIRST
I started a group on Linkedin called CPD-Candidate Pipeline Development (TM) http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/44169/3ED8F804D9C7
This is linked to the HTC Research Blog located here http://htcresearch.blogspot.com which doesn't have that many readers as I'm not a prolific blogger but this get's me approx 30 requests per day M-F and about 10 per day on Sat and Sunday. Every request I send an email to thanking them for joining the group and recommending that they connect by sending me an invite. Of the 170 requests per week I'm getting about a 70%-80% positive response rate and those that don't send me an invite it's usually because they are out of invites so they ask me to send one to them, which I do.

I recommend either starting a blog on a free blogging site or a web site on Ning.com and adding some content focused around the group you want to start. You can't/shouldn't just start a group for the sake of starting a group to get more connections. My opinion is you have to add value, so keep that in mind.

NEXT
I joined other groups. This suggestion came from Steve Burda who I think has over 10K first level connections.
I'm joined up to a lot of groups (about 300+)and I try to add something to each group I've joined. I may not read or post every month to every group but I do make an effort. I estimate I get about 10 invites a day (tough to track) from group member invites. I'm basing this on what people say in their invite requests such as "Hey Jeff saw you just joined the ____group and I'de like to connect"

THEN
I utilize the Q&A section appropriately.
Ask relevant questions not transparent ones!

A relevant question is a serious question that you really need the answer to. For example we are putting together a training DVD and I needed some legal advice so I would know the right questions to ask an attorney before spending the $250 per hour or whatever so I asked a specific question to the Legal group and of course I mentioned I was an open networker and here's my email address. Or I had a specific question about content delivery and what format people would prefer, web, dvd, cd etc or we're looking at moving our blog site from blogspot to a different service so I wanted some advice on that. All legit reasons and questions I actually needed the answers to and the people who answered were really quite helpful.

A transparent question is one that was specifically posted to promote you or your company. It's one where it is so blatantly obvious that the only reason you posted it was to advertise something. Personally, I've chosen to just ignore those types of questions and they range from; "What is the meaning of life?" or "What's your favorite season and Why?" to "Are strawberries the only fruit with seeds on the outside?" I used to hit my head against the wall every time I saw a question like this but I was getting too many lumps.:-)

NEXT
Answer questions.
I find it easier to ask relavent questions rather than answering them and I've found that I get more invites when asking rather than answering.
A) you can ask a question on just about any topic and make it legit and relavent.
b) very tough to answer a question where you don't know squat and make it legit and self promoting.

Asking and answering questions also helps me build my blog site. It gets my creative writing juices going and if I find a question particulary interesting I sometimes choose to write a response to myself to see what my actual thoughts are. Sometimes I post to my bog site, sometimes I just hit delete. What the heck, it's only digital ink and paper it's not like I killed a tree or something.

NEXT
I highly recommend joing the following three immediately (and sending me an invite)
Toplinked.com
Mylink500
LION
Invite Me Network
RecruitingBlogs.com

NEXT talk with other Top networkers and ask them what they did. I'm all about ease and automation, I'm not about to slog through hundreds, thousand of names on Linkedin to find the ones that are open networkers, have a valid email address in their profile and are not already on my first level. Nothing, in my mind could be more tedious! I've got better things to do as I'm trying to run a Research firm in my spare time while not building a Linkedin network ;-) Seriously though I spend about 5 hours a week on Linkedin and the benefits have been enormous. So thanks Linkedin!

I have 4-5 more things I do but this post is getting long and I've got stuff to do so I'll post more later.

Jeff Weidner
HTC Research

Data Extraction Tools; High Tech Theft or Sourcing Automation ?

An internet sourcer friend of mine and were talking and he was telling me that his employer, a large recruiting and RPO company, routinely uses a data extraction tool on some of the biggest resume job boards to pull down 10's of thousands of resumes every night. Now, I have no way of confirming this so I'll keep Company names out of the conversation but where is the line in the sand for these data extraction tools?

For those of you that aren't familiar with DE tools, imagine if you could program a piece of software to do the following;
1) Log into your favorite job board
2) perform specific searches for candidate resumes
3) Follow the link to each individual's resume
4) compare that resume/name/address/phone against other resumes you already have in your ATS
5) if it's not a duplicate then create a new candidate file and save the file

It's a way of automating the whole process.

Now imagine if you had 20 subscriptions and could pull 10,000 resumes per subscription per night. As you can imagine it wouldn't take long for you to have the entire job board database.

Now I'm certainly not advocating the use of DE Tools in this manner. It is blatantly wrong, IMO, to strip a company of it's most valued asset; that being the data it creates/supplies.

But putting that scenario aside. What if you used it on a more limited basis say on Linkedin. As anyone with a Linkedin account knows it's damn near impossible to extract Name, Address, Company name and a profile address out of Linked in. Try copying the info into MS Word and you get all the graphics, MSExcel- ugh nothing is formatted, notepad and forget about it completed unformatted mess. But the DE tool could can the search results of every page and extract only the information you needed/wanted and put it into an Excel Spreadsheet format making it easier to verify the information and manipulate the information by sorting the columns, do a global replace of a title or company name, etc.

So where is that "Line in the Sand" for Data Extraction Tools?
Are we as Internet Researchers solely responsible for their use/mis-use or are the Internet sites solely responsible for protecting their data?
How it is different from Google spidering a web site and cataloging the web pages a site, so they can sort for relevancy claiming it adds more value to their service and then sell advertising (a lot of advertising).
And you can't say "Well as long as you use it in a limited fashion." Define Limited. What you define as limited as a single research working from a Home Office may not meet a Corp Staffing Mgr's definition of Limited that has to keep 50 recruiters flush with names to call every day.

Jeff Weidner

Title HTC Research Corp

Watch out Hoover's Linkedin is nipping at your

So last night I was just running through my typical end of day routine; a stroll around the office to say good night to everyone, check the coffee pot to make sure it's turned off, one last look at the next day's calendar and a quick check on my various email accounts. I noticed an email from Linkedin Customer Support concerning that request for more invites I sent in 2 weeks ago. Wow, they gave me another 500 invites! So I popped onto Linkedin and started going through the 1300+ contacts I have uploaded but haven't sent an invite to and used up most of my 500 new invites in about 40 seconds. Ahh one can never have too many Linkedin contacts:-). While I was toiling away at my contacts I noticed a new "beta" feature on Linkedin "the Company Profile".

Now when you do a search on LI, specifically for contacts from a particular company, on the results page will be a link to the Company Profile. "Check out the XYZ Company Profile". From first glance LI did a very good job organizing the page. They crammed a lot of information in a one page profile which includes the following:

Left column
1)A company Summary
2)Company employees in your network
3)New Hires in your network
4)Recent promotions and changes
5) Popular profiles

Right Column
1) Related companies
2) Key Statistics on top locations
a)Basic profile info such as Company Gross Revenues, # employees, Web site etc
b)Most common job titles, top schools employees attended, median age, gender
3)Job listings for the Company

The profile data is being supplied in partnership with Business Week and the statistical information is Estimated based on LinkedIn Data.

Linkedin just took step closer to being a one stop shop for corporate information. And best of all it's real time and most of the data is updated by the users. User updated content has it's drawbacks but if monitored can be incredibly valuable, especially to a savvy candidate researcher or recruiter.

Jeff Weidner
HTC Research Corp
925 313 9005 X 200

Is it possible to get only the Junior Sales Reps when sourcing names from a target company?

OK, read this with a grain of salt tucked under a pillow. Or whatever the saying is.

Is it possible to get only the Junior Sales Reps? Yes, though much more difficult for an inexperienced phone sourcer. And without a doubt you have to use the correct ruse.

There are a lot of variables with developing an effective ruse, such as how large is the company you're calling into, is it the HQ or a small field office, what kind of sales rep (inside or outside) and on and on...

So I can give you a fish or give you a rod and some line and teach you to fish or I can teach you how to build a fishing rod and where to get some line and you can figure out the rest.

Here's where I teach you how to build the rod; you see most sourcers approach the problem of how to penetrate the company from their own personal point of view. You need to change your point of view and think about “what would the target company need to provide to the target job title (employee)”. You see, companies are support systems for their employees and visa versa. Find out what each side needs and develop a ruse to provide it to them. Put another way you have to think strategically not tactically.

Most people think;
How can I get the names of these sales people?
Where are these sales reps located?
What are their titles?
How do I get the junior sales people and not the senior sales people?

What you should be thinking is;
What do junior sales reps need that senior sales reps don’t?
What does a company provide to its junior sales people that it doesn’t to their senior sales people?
How are junior sales reps different than senior reps?
If I were a junior sales rep just starting out a new company I wish I had FITB (fill in the blank)?

Then develop a list.
Sales tools such as software (CRM) access
Training
Mentoring
Introductions to established accounts
Phone skills seminars
Etc

Then develop a short script for each item on the list and see how it fits. Does it sound credible? If you were on the other end of the phone would it make sense?

Of course the other option is to just pull the entire list of sales people and profile everyone on the list. Usually, if you have a list of 10 targets it'll be about 50/50 as to which tactic/strategy we use here at HTC.

I hope this helps and good luck,

Jeff Weidner
HTC Research
Copyright 2008