[Essential Mediatech] Afternoon Keynote by Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn
So, the afternoon here at Essential Mediatech has started, and we started with an interesting talk by Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn on a wide range of marketing strategies, comparing approaches of old to new and small to big companies. Reid used to work for PayPal before he went to LinkedIn and clearly has a lot of experience in business and understanding marketing strategies and revenue models.
In short Reid talked about the difference between how people think one should start a business and plan the monetization, versus how he thinks it is best approached. He stated that the old model is to have revenue as soon as you start, be self sufficient and grow on the existing revenue streams once you have established them. On the opposite he claims the new model should be to setup placeholder revenue models as soon a possible, but to plan to change these models as the business grows. For example, if you plan to have a complex advertisement model that is very targeted, don’t start building that at first, but in contrary start with placing Google Ads until the time comes to change the advertisement to a more complex revenue model.
In his new model he claims that monetization is at first irrelevant. If you plan to take a couple of risks in a business, which would you think is more valuable: establishing the monetization or establishing a community? If you build a large community soon any change in the monetization strategies will have a far larger effect on you revenue model than when you start building the revenue models before the community is established. Obviously it is good to build some kind of monetization when you start, because being established and self funding is interesting and motivating, but clearly expect to change the model whenever you reach a higher level of company operation.
I thought this was a very interesting talk, and I have 2 more pages of notes left that I didn’t use in this post, so I will see if Reid has written about this somewhere else or maybe placed this presentation on SlideShare.
