LinkedIn: How to build a media empire, starting with social job sites

LinkedIn entered the online content publishing industry for the past two years, when it launched a project called Influencers, inviting big business figures such as Richard Branson and Jack Welch to write original articles for the site.

Since then, publishing original content has become another important strategy for LinkedIn. Its 100 million users are potential authors, a strategy that has turned LinkedIn from the initial social-networking job site into a media-operating website dedicated to bringing professional knowledge and insights to users around the world.

For LinkedIn, the importance of this strategy can be seen in the attention of management. For example, Ryan Roslansky, who is responsible for media content products, says he receives a lot of emails every day from CEO Jeff Weiner. Jeff Weiner will talk to him regularly about the progress of the LinkedIn content release business, highlighting it with Wall Street analysts for quarterly earnings, as well as focusing on the amount of time users spend on media content. All this shows that the media content field is directly concerned by the top leadership.

And LinkedIn recently set up its first office outside Kings View headquarters in San Francisco. And just this summer, hundreds of engineers, product managers and other employees have moved to the new office, which is located near the San Francisco financial district.

And the new office is just the beginning, as the dream of the LinkedIn media empire is building a bigger place, at least 450,000 square feet, expected to be completed by 2016, with 2,500 employees working in the future.

In fact, the whole product department from the company's headquarters to move to another place such things, in the technology companies are not many, rarely seen. Many companies, such as Facebook, Google and Apple, try to keep the entire engineering team in one environment, and if they buy a small new venture, they will move the team to join them.

In fact, compared to other companies, the relocation of LinkedIn did not cause much attention, such as Pinterest although only 50 employees but when it moved from the Silicon Valley to San Francisco, there is a lot of attention, but also some other technology companies. Now LinkedIn is a bigger company in San Francisco, as well as a group of nearly 2000 people in San Francisco, like Twitter.

The San Francisco office has gained a lot of independence and autonomy, just as Google's 2005 acquisition of YouTube completely retained its working space in the southern part of San Francisco.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, has bought a lot of tech ventures, such as SlideShare, which moved from its small office in San Francisco to the LinkedIn building. and Pulse, LinkedIn's own news-reading app, moved from San Francisco to Silicon Valley a year ago, but is now moving back to San Francisco. This summer, LinkedIn also acquired Newsle, a news search company based in San Francisco, and simply went straight to the new office.

SlideShare team moved into LinkedIn's San Francisco office.

San Francisco is certainly the right place for the media industry. The future headquarters of LinkedIn is on a street with CBS, and a few blocks away is a well-known tech blogging company like Wired,techcrunch. LinkedIn hopes the new office position will allow them to face the same human resources as the companies that hire engineers, product managers, and editors.

Of course, the most well-known of all LinkedIn products is the content release platform that started 3 years ago. At first it was just a Roslansky idea, and he wanted each user to be able to publish his own independent content, but Weiner told him it was better to start with some well-known business figures.

For this reason Weiner hired former editor Dan Roth of Fortune and Wired magazine to do executive editing. Then Roth builds LinkedIn's first editorial team, which is responsible for selecting the right articles and titles for the home page. At first they chose 150 celebrities and then expanded, and now all 100 million users in the United States have the right to post a large text of their websites, and LinkedIn plans to enter other English-speaking countries by the end of the year.

Now using these tools LinkedIn can post about 7,000 messages per workday. By contrast, the New York Times, with 1330 people, can only publish 700 articles a day.

Of course, the times of the article level and quality is still a little higher, but the advantage of LinkedIn is its diversity and relevance, all of which are related to career direction, whether it's sales skills, growth strategies, or how to survive an office struggle, all of these articles and content, LinkedIn doesn't have to pay any fees.

Of course, LinkedIn's media content business also faces some challenges, such as how to get more users and allow users to read more of the content. At the same time they have to face a lot of competition, such as the question and answer website Quora and programming forum StackOverflow and so on, because these companies have attracted a lot of technical experts attention.

But in the competition, LinkedIn is ready to move into the heart of the media and technology industry, San Francisco.

(via ReadWrite/fast carp)

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)