According to TechCrunch, Mark Andreessen is joining the Board of Directors of Facebook. Announcements will be made this week. Anrdreessen will keep his position as Chairman over at Ning, the group social networking site.
This is a key development for Facebook, Ning, and Andreesen.
Facebook gets a seasoned and highly succesful, yet still relatively young entrepreneurial internet executive in Andreessen. Not too long ago, Andreessen was the darling of Silicon Valley as Zuckerberg is somewhat today.
Andreessen, 36, can lend Zuckerberg, 24, a ton of insight as to how to manage a social technology company that’s serving as a change agent. More specifically, how to manage it through these initial growth stages to maturity.
A problem Facebook has had is its “apologize rather than ask permission” strategy that can backfire. Leaders have to know when and how to do that - and when to hold back.
Facebook’s groups and fan pages also suffer from lack of vitality. Ning specialized in them. Ning, however, completely lacks the panache that Facebook has. I have no idea if a merger or a purchase is in the works, but it shouldn’t be overlooked.
This move once again solidifies Andreessen’s stature as a true player in the business world as well.
No Comments » Posted on June 30th, 2008 by Jonathan Trenn
I have been trying to record some of the sessions at PodCampOhio but since my lovely Nokia N95 8GB isn’t working with 3G (thanks, AT&T 3G for breaking on me), I have been doing my best using Qik with EDGE, which sucks. The good news is that I was able to record quite a little bit of Jennifer Laycock’s session on how to get your podcast to go viral and how to do online promotion and blogger outreach. Jennifer is a guru and an expert and I am damned glad to know her! The session below was called “Orchestrating a Viral Explosion.”
Unfortunately, I only recorded six-minutes of the session… From the session notes:
Everyone wants the benefits of a viral campaign, but few people really understand how to put the pieces together to create the best chance for success. Find out the most common mistakes companies make when aiming to go viral and how a little bit of brainstorming can set you up for success. Jennifer Laycock will walk you through the actual brainstorming process she uses with clients to help you gather information needed to put things together. She’ll also help you learn to identify “key influencers” within your industry and will offer concrete tips on the best way to approach them with your campaign.
Bill Balderaz, President of Webbed Marketing, is a Social Media rock star! I sat in on his session at PodCampOhio, Strategies for blogging, podcasting and social network marketing — and even tried to stream it via Qik but only got seconds of it! You should check out his session if at all possible — I don’t know who else recorded it — I only got one minute :(:
I spent my weekend hanging out with the most passionate social media mavens ever, from PodCamp here in Hilliard, Ohio. There were just some of the blog mentions I have found so far about PodCampOhio — I will try to look around a little bit more and I will post again when I find more stuff.
I’m on a online discussion forum called YoungPRPRos. We recently had someone ask if anyone has had a hard time working with Wikipedia editors in getting a entry approved. In the email query to all of us, she described the editors as being “Nazis”. She did so because they had described the entry she wrote as being over promotional. She insisted this wasn’t the case…that it was neutral that the accusation was unfair.
So I suggested that she send us the links to the entry. She complied, I clicked through and found a very promotional piece. Not even close. Basically it was copy that you would see in an online bio from a company website or a bio written for a speaker program.
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