Most of us have signed up for LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network, and many of us use it occasionally, but we haven't really figured out how to get the most of it.  So I asked a longtime friend and former colleague, Jeff Taylor, to share his advice.  Jeff, a Senior Vice President at Fleishman-Hillard Government Relations in Washington, DC, has had more success with the service than anyone else I know.

(Listen to the 11 minute interview.)

“In the early going I had no luck whatsoever,” Jeff Taylor told me of his experience with LinkedIn, likening it to his golf awakening. “For many years I didn’t play golf very well, then one day I hit the ball straight and I hit it 280 yards.”

And one day he received a lead from his LinkedIn connections that ended up netting his employer at the time, a law firm, a $500,000 account.  He quickly became a believer.

Whereas many of us use LinkedIn rather passively, Jeff has jumped in with both feet.  He says he currently has more than 4200 connections. He advises people looking to get the most of the service to use things like LinkedIn Answers to build better relationships with your network. By answering other people’s questions, you show expertise and generosity.  By posing questions, you can gather valuable intelligence.

Early on, Jeff found that he needed to spend a lot of time cultivating connections, but now he is in maintenance mode and gets an estimated 20-30 connection requests each day.

Jeff notes that there are two schools of thought on how to build your network.  Some (like me) choose to connect only with people who they actually know.  Others (like Jeff) are much less discriminating in an effort to build a larger network for potential business use.

In addition to the passive results he gets, Jeff also uses LinkedIn proactively to find contacts at companies he is trying to pitch. He has even been able to rekindle old friendships in the process.

(Listen to the 11 minute interview.)

"We don't even have to really debate whether or not people can start web companies in a variety of places," Brian Oberkirch says, "but how do you do it when you are not in a place like the Bay Area?" That's the topic of discussion in the latest Disruptive Dialogue.

(Click here to listen to the 13 minute interview.)

The discussion took place in the wake of a blog post that Brian wrote recently titled "Location, Location, Location (doesn't matter as much."  Based in Louisiana, Brian knows a bit about working outside of Silicon Valley as a web entrepreneur and advisor.

Topics discussed include networking ideas, thoughts on sharing office space with other web types to build a greater sense of community, and the notion of companies having remote, virtual teams.

I suggested that perhaps companies in the technology hotbed may focus more on building to flip, while outside of the Bay Area, entrepreneurs seem more focused on building sustainable companies that may well get acquired, but that's not the sole focus.  Brian thought that the there is definitely a different mindset in a "company town" like the San Francisco region that looks to behemoths like Google and Apple, but he wasn't certain that there was a difference in the sustainability aspect.

Brian notes that talent in Silicon Valley is just as hard to find as elsewhere, just for different reasons.  The talent pool may be larger for engineers in San Francisco, but the demand is much higher as well.

Bottom line, according to Brian: "Location may not be as much of a barrier as it used to be."

Chris Brogan graciously agreed to speak with Disruptive Dialogue about his advice to "media makers" who want to make a living off of creating media.  This is a topic he has written about on a number of occasions, but perhaps most comprehensively in a blog post over the summer.

(Click here to listen to the 15 minute interview.)

In the interview, he stressed that his advice applies primarily to those who want to make money directly from their media content, as opposed to people who create media for their friends and family or even professionals who simply aim to raise their profile and build their reputation.  This is, in his words, for "someone looking to pay their way."

At first, many successful podcasters or video bloggers "lived by their show name."  Chris wanted to make sure that people understood that what they ought to be creating instead is a production company brand rather than simply a show brand. In so doing, it becomes easier to create spin-off enterprises, to sell a particular effort to another company, or fold a failure without taking the brand down with it.

In addition, Chris talked about how he has a less than 2 minute segment in each Marketing Over Coffee podcast to help build his own brand ("Social Business Class").  This represents an example of what he describes as designing content that can be "slotted in" to a larger content production.  He notes that sometimes larger media enterprises may be looking for chunks of content to incorporate into their efforts, and if a media maker creates his material in such a way that it can be easily adopted, it may be able to expand its reach through partnerships.

The comments on Chris' original post were echoed in this interview in which he discussed the fact that a successful media enterprise will often create a community which will enable revenue opportunities beyond advertising.  But fundamentally, media creators must be sure to understand the needs of advertisers and ensure that they are collecting the appropriate traffic and demographic data that potential sponsors will want to know. He laments that many content builders don't have the "business sense" that they need to make a living at what they do and urges them to gain that knowledge.

The interview then turned to a discussion of the merits of audio versus video as a business model, including a brief look at Shel Holtz's post on that very topic today. Chris noted that his original post has frequently been misconstrued to be making a case against audio in favor of video.  In fact, he notes that he loves audio-based media and that a lot of video actually works better as audio because the video doesn't add value.  In particular, we talked about the Scoble Show which we both often listen to rather than watch, although we agreed that Robert does some of his shows where the visible content adds significantly to the understanding and impact.

"I don't think people who are investing money are right now very interested in audio overall," Chris warns. He senses more innovation in the video space which excites investors, and he recalled a recent conversation where he noted how hard it is for consumers to record and post audio online as opposed to video which has a lot of consumer-friendly solutions available.

Chris notes that the Student Loan Network not only has the Financial Aid Podcast, but they also have begun to dip into video in order to do things like show how to make a perfect cup of coffee (to save money by not going to Starbucks).  It underscores his point that the future will be made up of "media makers," not single silo audio, video, or text creators.  Blended, or multimedia, offerings will be the ones that succeed.

(Click here to listen to the 15 minute interview.)

My Internet radio show, Disruptive Dialogue, is coming back.  It has been on hiatus since the last episode was recorded and released on July 4.  I had put it on the shelf because of time constraints and because, although I was getting positive feedback on it, I didn't feel it had really found the right format and didn't differentiate enough from other podcasts (except that it was my somewhat unique point of view).

But it dawned on me today while listening to an NPR report about Jeff Jarvis' Networked Journalism conference last week that the role for Disruptive Dialogue should be just that: a dialogue.  So I will be coming back at you with interviews and conversations (and maybe even some debate) with leading voices on the same topics that write about here.

You can expect a good bit of dialogue about the future of media, the role of social media, how entrepreneurship and content mix, and much more. 

A few other changes you can expect:

• I'm dropping episode numbers.  I never really liked them, and I'm taking advantage of version 2 to eliminate them.  Shows will be titled, just like blog posts are, to help listeners understand what will be included.
• No more obscure show notes.  Instead, I plan to write a brief post summarizing the conversation so that anyone who doesn't have time to listen can still walk away with value -- beyond simply the table of contents list. 
• The term podcast is going away, as you may have noticed in the opening sentence of this post.  Disruptive Dialogue is an Internet radio program.  For many potential listeners and guests, the term podcast conjures up an unnecessarily technical view of what's going on.  If you can click and listen to sports radio or NPR on the web, why marginalize what we do by assigning an obscure (and misleading) term to it?
• New content will not appear on a pre-arranged timetable.  The Internet removes the necessity to confine oneself to a specific publishing schedule or length.  To do so is simply creating arbitrary rules.  Instead, new shows will come out when I have a dialogue that is worth sharing.  That may be a few times one week, and none the next. 

I have already lined up some interesting people to begin the dialogue, and I hope you will tune in.  As always, I will include updates on new shows at both my blog, Pardon the Disruption, and on the Disruptive Dialogue web site itself.

Disruptive Dialogue is on an indefinite hiatus as the demands of my various businesses do not permit me to devote the resources I once did to make this a consistent and information-packed weekly podcast.  I hope to return to it (perhaps in a different format) in the not-too-distant future.

Thanks for listening.