For my final project for the class “Social Networks and Virtual Worlds” I gave myself the task to analyze what the future has in store for Social Networks. I wanted to know what would be the themes students would discuss in this class a few years from now. Although I couldn’t quite predict which Social Networks would still be around and which would be the new ones that would have “crossed the chasm”, I found very interesting insights conceptually about the direction in which these systems will develop. 

During the semester-long course we read Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, both Forrester analysts. This post by Charlene Li helped me understand the 4 conceptual components that Social Networks will pursue in order to become “like air” for us. The last of these points, “Market Value defined by Social Influence” is key when trying to make sense of the monetization strategies that Social Networks have in place today and will seek to implement in the short-term. As this Business Week article points out, Google has an ambition plan for this already, developing a sort of “PageRank” for people, based on the influence they have in their social media surroundings.

Below are the slides I’ll use for the presentation tonight. I must say that I really enjoyed this “virtual” class and I learned a lot from fellow students and the keynote speakers we had the privilege to have during the course. A big thank you to Prof. John Bourne for making this course a (virtual) reality at Babson.

Mondays nights are usually the nights I end up dreaming and speaking in my sleep about numbers and balance sheets after a late class of Entrepreneurial Finance. The takeaway from that class is always very straightforward: Entrepreneurs don’t have to be accountants in order to see financial statements from arms-length and be able to perceive uses, sources and status of capital and hence be able to conclude what’s wrong or right about the business. Our faculty for this course insists on neglecting the use of spreadsheets and calculators, he wants common and rapid sense when looking at numbers in financial statements. Gut-driven entrepreneurial finance. Love it.

So Mondays are always days filled with numbers and today was not the exception: I received 2 emails that had a number in the first sentence and that together give a simple summary of my life these days: 208 days until graduation and 168 days until my wife’s due date (the latter arrived in my inbox from BabyCenter.com). The former was from the Center for Career Development of Babson, sharing with us all the open positions and job-seeking resources that are available to us…and scaring the crap out of the entire Class of 2009 at the same time. The second email, I must say, provided comfort, excitement and joy. I can’t wait until the cold New England winter is over and I can greet my son/daughter into this world.

In case you were wondering, in my own scared-to-death-because-of-the-economic-meltdown job search process, things are progressing. At least I know where my passion is inclining me to apply: Apple, Facebook, Google, Digg, AT&T and Netflix are on my list as of today. Let’s see what happens.

I must first say how much I’m enjoying the class of Prof. Anirudh Dhebar called “Marketing High-Tech Products”. It is some sort of philosophical marketing class in which we discover the inner mechanics of every part of the theory of marketing, heavily applied to products and services that have a high-profile or high-tech component.

In one of his classes he put marketing aside to briefly give us some advice in our search for a job. There’s one quote that really resonated in me (which I bold and underline below) regarding the way we present ourselves. I literally quote from the email he sent later to follow-up on this subject:

First and foremost, never, ever, ever, ever forget the following line (attributed to Nicolas Hayek of the Swatch Group conglomerate): “Everything you do and the way you do everything sends a message.” You want potential recruiters to treat you as “world-class,” then there is only one choice: In how you prepare for and conduct yourself during and after the interview, be world-class in what you do and how you do it. And that requires your “message” to be “strong, exciting, distinctive, authentic, consistent, clear, and credible.” Yes, a tall order!

Thanks a lot to Prof. Dhebar for this and if you know of somebody searching for a job, please forward him these thoughts.

On Monday I had the chance to interview Matt Lauzon, Co-founder and CEO of Paragon Lake, as part of an assignment for my Entrepreneurship class with Prof. Zacharakis. Matt is an overly nice person and an accomplished entrepreneur at just 23 years of age. Amazing story.

His company, Paragon Lake (a startup that is using the latest and greatest web based technology to change the way people buy and sell fine jewelry) just got $5.8 million in VC funding and expanded its executive team. 

Being the busy individual he is, he sat down with me for half an hour and patiently answered to my questions. Think of it as giving back to Babson and, as he pointed out in the interview, “always agreeing to take people out to lunch”. This strategy of constantly reaching out to people and offer them a fraction of your time certainly tops Matt’s list of key success factors. That and having a team of “world-class ass-kickers in what they do”, individuals with “high levels of integrity” that helped him build a culture in his company of which he is extremely proud.

Apart from being an entrepreneurial story worth telling, Matt’s is the classic example of an opportunity in an established industry where not much has changed and is very fragmented (jewelry). Paragon Lake’s ability to put the right technology in the hands of the right people is what took them to where they are now: changing the way an industry does business.

A big thank you to Matt for his time and for giving me this experience. It definitely tops my list of “key entrepreneurial days” in my MBA at Babson.

Today I attended my first class in Second Life, the famous virtual world for the elective Social Networking and Virtual Worlds. It was an interesting experience and it certainly changed my skeptical perception of the uselessness of SL. Yes, I thought it was kind of absurd to spend time and money in a world that really doesn’t exist…but the truth is that today we experienced a real class, with a real speaker, with real slides and with real interaction. Just like the one you have in a real-world class. I must say that I’m positively impressed with the result of this experiment. The learning process and setup time for all attendees is still very high and complicated but I guess this can be reduced in subsequent meetings.

The guest speaker (who interestingly is physically located in New Zealand) was Mary Ellen Gordon, the CEO of Market Truths, a company that among other things assists brands and firms to understand and interact with their customers in SL. She gave examples of companies that have successfully played a role in SL and have found that there are unique and beneficial characteristics using this channel as part of a marketing mix.

I want to use this post also to introduce the blogs of my classmates Deanna Briggs, Katrina Gosek and Jesse Mendenhall. Keep up the good work guys!