Wise Startup Blog

I’ve been trying to dedicated myself to a number of my social networks that I have recently become members, and I’m really falling in love with LinkedIN.

Per the duties of my job, I have to hunt down record labels to solicit talk to them about licensing their content in our music network, Grooveshark. And part of this involves me scouring through our Billboard record label book, and also combing the Internet for any hint of an email address or phone number.

In the past, we’ve mostly been relegated to info@recordlabel.com, which is pretty much a dead-end for us. Normally, we would write these guys off until we found another connection to them, but now, we have LinkedIN.

Thanks for LinkedIN, when I’m searching for a contact at Sub Pop records, all I have to do is search in LinkedIN, and I find their General Manager, Director of Technology. And now, I have a name to put to that generic info@recordlabel.com. From there, what I’ve been doing is Googling these people, and finding whatever other information or contact portal I can for these people and from there I’m initiating a conversation.

So that brings us to the quick and easy bullet points people love:

Look for new customers on LinkedIN

If you have a particular industry you’re looking for, search for that term, and see who pops up.

Look for investors on LinkedIN

With the amount of self-promotion that goes on on this site, it’s hard to look somewhere without someone asking for $1-5 million in the Answers section, but, if you have tact, you can find the right people, and just figure out the correct approach to reach them.

Look for partners on LinkedIN

There’s nobody better to partner with than someone whose at the same stage of development as you. Besides crawling TechCrunch for the latest startups, LinkedIN is another great place to network with fellow startup entrepreneurs. Check out the Startups section of Answers and see who’s active.

Look to sell people when they come to your profile

Although it took me some time to learn this, this is definitely a valuable lesson. When visitors come to your profile, you have a chance to sell them. Whether you want them to visit your blog, buy your product, or become your friend, you only have a couple of seconds, so make sure you’re polished. Here’s my personal pitch:

Grooveshark is a music sharing community that compensates users for marketing their favorite artists. We developed our platform with the goal of competing with the illegal networks, and tapping into the over 300 billion illegal downloads yearly.

To truly compete with the illegal networks, we offer our users free, full-length streaming on any of our tracks, we give them $.25 compensation for any $.99 song they sell, and we give them the same drm-free collection they can find on the illegal networks, on our network, all while guaranteeing the labels and artists are paid.

We are actively looking to make new connections in the following areas:

* Record labels and artists looking to license their content in our community
* Complementary web-services looking to grow their user base and partnership opportunities
* Advertisers looking to expand their digital media portfolio with an innovative new advertising platform

Shoot me an email at andrew.wise@grooveshark.com

Hopefully these tips will be of help, but feel free to add any you’ve picked up.

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