LinkedIn making professional connections

Many of you have heard of LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a professional networking website.

Most LinkedIn profiles are made from uploaded resumes, but one's profile can be only the information a user would like to present to the public. LinkedIn earns it's revenues primarily from recruiters who would like to be able to search the 1st and second degree connections of the candidates they have Linked with on LinkedIn. This is nothing like spokes or jigsaw which are both tit for tat systems for contact information.

LinkedIn limits your ability to send messages to people. This means it is spam free. When you start out on LinkedIn it can be very difficult to use. If you have 10 people you trust and do business with maybe five will be active on LinkedIn and willing to accept your invitation to connect. When you connect to these five people they will often hide their connections from perusal. This means that you will often not be able to click on the connections link in their profile and read up on all of the people they have linked to.

If each of these five people has five connections you will have 25 second degree connections searchable by specific keywords. So if you know your friend knows a PhD in linguistics but you don't know anything else you can search for "PhD in linguistics" and the PhD's profile will show in the search even though the person connecting you to the PhD has explicitly requested that you are not able to peruse his connections. The first degree connections of these 25 second degree connections will also be visible to you, these are your third degree connections.

When you start out on LinkedIn it seems pretty redundant. Everything you find tends to be people you have heard of through conversations with the people you know. This is not very useful.

The advantages of LinkedIn come only with groups and LIONs.

When you join a group on LinkedIn, most of the group members will accept messages from other group members. This enables you to connect to professional and academic Alumni with common interests or professional synergy who you otherwise may never discover. By joining groups you brand your profile with the group logos and give recruiters and other users a sense of who you are.

LIONs are LinkedIn Open Networkers. It sounds like a dirty name. Why in the world would anyone want to promote themselves as someone who would "be open to any and all invites". Networking is supposed to enable people to grow connections less desperate then themselves not more desperate.

When I was under heavy pressure at work to learn what was going on in the offices of a handful of CIOs across the country I was a little desperate for information. So I added LION recruiters located in the zipcodes of the CIOs I needed to understand as part of my consulting practice. Through this network of LIONs I then saw many more LIONs searchable in LinkedIn. At that point I could be selective when it came to LIONs. I could choose the LIONs that shared groups and professional alliances with me and my company. I called into their offices to verify that they were indeed working where they said they worked and unlinked those LIONs who I could not verify.

So through searching, adding and filtering one can grow a networking of professional connections in large numbers from the comfort of their keyboard.

The number of direct connections a person has on LinkedIn is not a competition. If anything access to exclusive professional groups with strict verification is quite competitive but just as competitive as it is to get into these professional groups in any walk of life.

Please call me on my phone if you would like to connect on LinkedIn. It would be nice to hear the sound of your voice and learn a little about what has you curious.

I thought you ought to know that.

-David Caro-Greene

Online Data Services

People like to buy stuff online.

The assumption is that the Internet contains a lot of data.

More price and product data means better purchasing decisions.

The tragedy is that the Internet data is often very unusual, representing only the thin slice of the job, housing, goods or labor market having marketers who choose to engage online marketing vehicles.

Zillow real estate data is old stuff coming off the MLS. In my opinion a purchase from the MLS is like leaving your door open when you live across the street from Mosswood Park. The real estate agents have total control.

Real estate associations are notorious for keeping certain properties on the databases and others off to serve the needs of their constituencies. For instance in Berkeley agents took many properties off the market during the dive to keep local values high.

Intraday brokerage price data recieved by the public reflects the trading prices the brokerage will take. If you compare the prices between any two brokerages they will be close but rarely the same. Not to mention the time delay between a request to execute a trade and time of execution is not reported. This time difference is time during which a brokerage may have enough time to find a better price for themselves before they sell it to you. The Rothschilds were recently sued in international courts for doing this within their own mutual funds.

Job sites are qualitatively each very unique. Indeed is a decent aggregator but still a traditional job site. LinkedIn provides you with jobs within your network and Jobfox uses a sophisticated model to determine your fitness for a position. These days good recruiters and hiring managers are using all of the above to cross reference applicants resumes in addition to corporate press releases relating to the uptake or release of talent.

Froogle has never worked for me but maybe you have had better luck. In any case online data services may provide more information but this has increased the work required to make decisions not decreased it. This has provided people with the tools to make more comparisons but we have to make the comparisons to take advantage of the information.

I say take the information super highway but stay in the far right lane or you may very easily miss your exit.

I thought you ought to know that.

-David Caro-Greene

Last Day as an Independent Consultant

Tomorrow I will be officially appointed as a representative of MetLife. Shortly thereafter my paper work will reflect my title, Financial Advisor.

I have decided to use today to produce a few graphs to give people a material framework for understanding the national economy. In other words I will show you some pictures that will help you make sense of what is going on out there. All of this data comes from the 2002 Economic Census, so it is a bit out of date but still useful for understanding the foundations of our economy in terms of real numbers of dollars.

I broke the rules in producing these graphs in a few ways.

1) I added State and Federal taxes into one lump sum to represent tax revenues in 2003 as a way of showing the money going into Public Administration as a national business to be compared to other categories of business.

2) I added all of the numbers from a slew of Construction business categories together to produce a solid national construction business statistic.

3) The "Material Product Producing" categories and "Public Administration" category do not post operating expenses the same way that all other business categories do. So I had to produce some estimates where possible to get a visual on what is going on.

The blue "Operating Profits" represents how much money is pulled into that industry after taking out all operating expenses. The red "Non-Payroll" represents how much money is spent on operations outside of payroll and the green "Payroll" is how much money is paid to employees in that particular sector.

Before I talk about the blue, and green let's talk about what they might mean. Money that is clear and free in a business (the blue) can be used to grow the business by buying things and places that make the business run better or pay the investors dividends. Payroll (the green) gives us a sense of how much money is being used in that industry to pay employed people. Unemployed people make money too, the government collects this data in one category called nonemployer business, it will show up on our pie chart. Non-payroll (the red) expenses are very hard to estimate and they are not reported the same way in the good producing, or government industries the way they are in other industries.

Right off the bat we see Wholesale, Retail, Manufacturing, Government and Construction pump the largest amount of revenues through our economy. That seems to make sense to me. Everyone must eat, buy clothes, and have a manufactured roof over their constructed home.

The next tower we see does not make a lot of sense. Non-employer business revenues are approaching three quarters of a trillion dollars in a business category where we openly admit the people working in these businesses are not employees. There are no payroll numbers for this category because land preparation for farming and many lumberjack type jobs apparently don't pay in a way that can be easily understood by us urbanites.

One example would be the fishing industry in Alaska. The seasons dictate the hours and the availability of work, so it would be hard to call someone a full time employee if the fishing seasoned limited them to working only five months out of the year. Similarly this makes health benefits and other employer/employee issues hard to control when the people may change drastically from year to year.

Sadly this means that our national statistics admits a huge percentage of our economy is not very easy to measure in terms of benefits to working people.

A few very interesting points after that would be that the Management Services Industry brings in less money than it pays in payroll. This is very strange. I have no idea how this makes any sense at all. This is the kind of thing that would make a good project for the next post. Honestly, how many hundreds of millions does an industry have to lose before they stop doing what they are doing. Strangely these Management Services companies are still paying the official employees even though they don't make enough money to pay them.

Another strange data point I noticed is that Transportation operating expenses (the red in transportation) is only a few billion dollars. We are told on the news that the price of gas is reflected in all of the goods we buy on the shelves. If the operating profits in Retail and Wholesale are over 2 trillion dollars each why does a few billion dollar industry like Trucking get scapegoated for price inflation at the checkout counter?

By simply glancing at these graphs I have learned a few things.

1) Lawyers (Scientific & technical services workers), Doctors (Health Care workers) and Managers in commerce and government have plenty of payroll to dip into, maybe they should pick up some of the dragging economy.

2) Arts and Education (Education Services) may be under appreciated in our economy, maybe that is why we are not the "America the Beautiful" that we once were.

3) Mining and Utilities companies make a lot of money without paying much.

4) The government admits through census data that a large percentage of people are working but for Nonemployers and are stuck in situations with ill defined healthcare situations.

5) I have no idea where the money in Wholesale and Retail trade could be going. If I were a pessimist I would say it is leaving our country and being invested abroad. If I were an optimist I would say this makes up a large percentage of our stock market and retirement fund growth. I'm a realist so it's probably a lot of both.

The below pie chart enables you to compare the amount of money in payroll in the industries above.

I thought you ought to know that.

-David Caro-Greene

The Number of Unemployed People

They love to report the U.S. Unemployment Rate. 

The Unemployment Rate is a number generated by the number of claims for unemployment insurance submitted during a given period of time.

It only tells us how many people lost their jobs recently due to circumstances beyond their control. That is not very useful information.

So I produced a simple graph showing the number of working people (according to the BLS) and the number of people in this country (according to the Census). I produced a third line showing the number of people not working by taking away the number of people working from the number of people.

As you can see since 1998 the number of Unemployed people has been rising at a slight incline.

In that time the number of employed people has been rising at a much faster rate.

Overall the number of unemployed people over the last 11 years has been, roughly speaking, flat.

Given how many people ramble on about how easy it is to find a job and some rail on about how the economy has prevented them from paying the bills this might provide a more middle of the road perspective.

The data shows jobs are moving along as usual. I thought you should know that.

-David Caro-Greene

Pick an Asset

People will tell you there are a virtually unlimited number of things to invest in. These people are trying to make you feel overwhelmed. There are only four classes of assets out there. I'm going to tell you what they are and how these assets make money.

1) Stocks : Sales people make revenues.

2) Real Estate : The price of a place goes up and you bought it when it was down.

3) Commodities : The price of a thing goes up and you bought it when it was down.

4) Bonds, Loans, Debt : Debtors pay interest to Creditors.

So as you can see these financial terms really only represent the stuff you see every day, people, places, things and debt.

You may be thinking "one of these things is not like the others" and you would be right. Debt is the complicated part of finance. It is the part orthodox Catholics and Muslims have a moral issue with. So it is the part I will say something about.

If you borrow money do it at a low rate of interest, under 5% annual.

If you loan money do it at a high rate of interest, over 6%.

If you borrow a million dollars at 5% and loan the same million dollars at 6% how much money do you make for doing nothing each year?

$10,000

This $10,000 dollars has many names : interest rate differential, spread, marginal profit and bank rate. But don't let them fool you. Debt done right is always a way for someone to borrow from Peter to pay Paul and make a profit.

Lastly, this is not a pitch. Debt has it's risk. Let's say Peter stops loaning and Paul stops borrowing or worse. Debt is a contract between two parties not a magic spell. I thought you ought to know that.

-David Caro-Greene

The Fastest Growing Occupations data according to our County Reports

After doing a bit of work with the above linked raw data I produced a chart expressing how an 18 year old High School Graduate might best interpret and choose one of these Fastest Growing Occupations.

I have made several assumptions in this chart which may seem at first odd but were absolutely required as they reflect common sense and good judgement.

1) It costs 30,000 dollars a year to live in the Bay Area. This means while you are in school you or the person supporting you is losing this money.

2) Tuition is free.

3) You do not invest.

You really only have two choices if you want to make over 2 million dollars before your 46th birthday, Pharmacist and Sciences Manager. Be ready to fight for it because there will only be 30 Pharmacists and 17 Sciences Managers positions opening each year in the East Bay.

If you don't like to compete you might try an RN program or become a Computer Programmer. At 300 new people each year you still have to be in the top 3% of your nursing school to get a job, and at 250 new people a year in Computer Programming you had better have some top 1% connections because there is a Computer Programmer acting as CEO of a new Social Networking Startup on every street corner in the East Bay.

At this point in the LifeTime Earnings Graph we get to the Nerds.

Nerds lean on Academic Credentials for stuffy cushy jobs with no future, no upward potential and no sense of the free market spirit. Their incomes are entirely dependent on the number of years they spent toiling in the Moffit Library. They are the people that scratched all of that self loathing graffiti in the bathroom stalls and blamed it on the kids smoking cigars on the grass.

Nerds do well for themselves because they lean on the State system for the education to provide them with privilege and the State budget for the pay check. Sadly the State can't borrow any more money with our tax dollars to maintain the Nerds in the life style to which they have become accustomed. So young Nerds may have the black rimmed glasses, the pocket protectors and the juicy red washington delicious apples, but they are not going to get paid like they used to.

Then you have people like me, Writers, Authors, PR specialists, Representative Agents, and Financial Consultants. We make the free market system work. We provide people with information they need to make the decisions that will determine their quality of life. When we do our jobs right people are happy. When we don't do our jobs right everything goes wrong. When writers, authors, and consultants go wrong, people get confused and make bad decisions. People usually blame themselves for their personal failure to make good decisions while they rarely take the time to know how a good decision is made. Good decisions are made by rational people who know the relevant facts. The number of facts a person may access and the applied relevance of those facts in predicting and producing the desired outcomes is what defines the quality of a person's decisions.

For instance anyone choosing to work for less than 13$ an hour has doomed themselves to a life of poverty.

Based on the above data and discussion a person should avoid the following list of activities at all times to avoid building a lifelong money losing career:

Product Promotions

Butchering

Personal Care

Pet Care

Manicures and Pedicures

Pumping Gas

Cleaning Cars

Serving Fast Food

If you are doing or plan on doing one of these forbidden activities please drop everything and see your doctor. To take any one of these occupations defies all rational thought. Those who take these positions may be suffering from brain damage. When you see one of these poor souls please give them my URL, dcgfinancial.com , and let them know we are here to help.

-David Caro-Greene

Direct

The Raiderettes closed a deal with AsiaAir stipulating that these women will have "Money in the Bank" for the rest of thier lives based on a Jet Plane marketing deal in which images of these women are used on the side of a new fleet covering all of Asia last month.

I thought you ought to know that.

-David Caro-Greene