“Get naked and rule the world” – in its April issue, Wired magazine called on companies to communicate with radical transparency. The 3rd Social Web Breakfast this morning addressed the issue with a discussion on  “Unternehmenskommunikation im Social Web: Ehrlich oder sexy?”. Guest speaker and viral marketing expert Markus Roder focused on the question, and gave responses on the type of companies and brands for which complete transparency is the right choice, and which companies are better off not telling the whole story.

Markus Roder described four different brand types: trophy brands, aspiration brands, attitude brands and tribal brands. His advice: Find out which brand you belong to and adjust the level of transparancy accordingly. Here you can see a few of the 30 guests mulling over his advice:

Obviously XING is “type 3”, an “attitude brand”: Customers forming a community, customers who are communicating a lot, and communication which cannot be controlled. Attitude brands are well advised to tell the truth and to offer a high level of transparency. As for XING, we do our best - with this blog for example ;)

The German poet Heinrich Heine once said, “Perfumes are the feelings of flowers.” Now you can share that perfect feeling with your customers, business partners, employees, or with anyone you feel like, thanks to Fleurop.com, one of the many PremiumWorld partners at XING. Premium Members will now save 15% when they order flowers and gifts online, in over 160 countries around the world. If you want to keep a corporate focus you can always order a bouquet in your company’s colors. Ahh, lovely XING dark green stems topped with radiant white blooms... ;-) 

Check out the PremiumWorld Fleurop offer, and don’t wait too long to make someone happy!

100 golf addicted networkers met last Thursday to a unique official XING event at the BMW International Open in Munich.

Have a look at the beautiful fotos . Many thanks to the organizers of the XING community Munich, Johannes Woll &  Martin Bockelmann and our partner BMW.

This year, Lars Hinrichs was invited to speak at the 29th “Gründerfoyers” forum “Dresden exists”, which was organized by the TU Dresden and entitled "Internet business Web 2.0" – about his own career, entrepreneurship, self employment and the XING platform itself.

The “Gründerfoyers” forum is designed to bring students and academics – along with curious and undecided types – into contact with professionals, consultants, politicians and economists to discuss the subject of self employment.

After his talk, the audience had the chance to speak to Lars in person and we’ve since found out that two new Web 2.0 start-ups have come to life since the event took place. We wish these ventures all the best and every success.

On June 19th the XING Regionalgroup Köln organized a very successful official XING event on the Papstschiff MS Rheinenergie. At this wonderful sunny evening more than 1000 XING members gathered on board the MS Rheinenergie to network and chat with friends and business partners.  The wonderful weather and excellent service on board formed the framwork of this great event and made it an evening to remember for all participants.

Many thanks & congratulations to the organizers Martin Müller & Anne-Katrin Scherer for their fantastic work! Check out the fotos of the event here.

See the movie about the event (sorry, German only)

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

“Con la adquisición de Neurona, site líder en España y Latinoamérica, Xing da un gran paso adelante hacia el liderazgo mundial del sector.  Para Grupo Intercom, la relación que hoy se inicia con Xing estoy seguro que nos permitirá afrontar nuevos proyectos en común, por las sinergias existentes con varias de nuestras 30 empresas. La seriedad y proyección que he constatado en Xing garantiza un importante incremento de las funcionalidades y tamaño de red que sin duda disfrutarán todos los usuarios de Neurona.”

“The acquisition of Neurona, the leading business networking site in Spain and Latin America, marks a large step forward for XING to becoming a global leader in the industry. For Grupo Intercom, the business relationship with XING that begins today will, I’m sure, open up opportunities for new joint projects in the future, based on the synergies with several of our 30 online businesses. The professionalism and target audience that I've been able to confirm in XING will lead to an important increase in the number of new functionalities and network size which, no doubt, all Neurona users will be able to benefit from."

¡Hola de nuevo! ¿Qué tal os va? Mi español esta mejorando pero todavía me falta mucho para poder escribir este post completamente en español. Just a few minutes ago we announced the acquisition of Neurona.com, the largest Spanish networking website with more than 830,000 business contacts in Spain and Latin America. Our negotiations with Antonio Gonzalez Barros, CEO of the leading Spanish incubator grupoINTERCOM, who owns the lion share of the company, and Ferran Aznar, CEO and Co-founder of Neurona, were most successful.

I would like to express our strong appreciation and interest in the Spanish market. We sense great opportunities for us as individuals and as a company. Following our first acquisition of eConozco , with over 150,000 members, we now have a *huge number* of Spanish speaking business professionals in Spain and Latin America on the site, which indisputably makes us the market leader in the Spanish business networking market (on top of our already established market leadership in Germany).

At this time, we would also like to thank the team at Neurona for their great work and welcome them to the global XING team. We look forward to meeting all of you in Barcelona – definitely one of the world’s coolest places besides Hamburg.

Yesterday it felt like birthday, Christmas and Easter had all come at once: the marketing department asked me to test out some of the new goodies we'll be using for merchandising in future. But why on earth did they asked me to try out the brainfood and networking pills? What about all those funky shirts and cute caps? ;-) Watch out for our merchandising shop coming sooner or later.

[click pic y ver trailer]

Yonathan Stern and Lars Hinrichs 

OPEN Business Club AG will co-operate with the US company Zoom Information Inc. 

ZoomInfo is a business information search engine that indexes the Business Web to quickly find information about industries, companies and people. The partnership will provide XING’s 2 million-plus members with immediate access to profiles on nearly 36 million business people and 3.8 million companies directly from the XING platform.

Furthermore, XING Premium Members will have the ability to contact over 18 million professionals directly and securely. ZoomInfo’s 4.5 million unique monthly visitors will also be able to join XING’s business network directly with a simple two-click process.

The integration between XING’s platform and ZoomInfo’s search engine is planned to go live in the fall of 2007. The entry into the US market is another step in the framework of the announced international expansion strategy of OPEN Business Club AG. The cooperation agreement with ZoomInfo represents the company’s first in North America.

XING enters US Market
Markteintritt für XING in Amerika

Have a look under our “Official XING event” heading on the Events page:  We currently have eleven official XING events coming up, in locations spanning from Bejing to United Arab Emirates

Here are three special highlights for next week:

 1) Tuesday, June 19^th: A XING event on the innovative event ship MS Rheinenergie in  Cologne with more than 1,000  confirmed attendees.  More infos here.

2) Wednesday, June 20^th: A XING networking event under palm trees in Dubai, at the Habtoor Grand Resort Hotel, set on a terrace overlooking the beach. Details.     

3) Thursday, June 21^st: A XING event at the famous BMW International Open golf tournament in Munich.  Sign up for the rare tickets.

Keep an eye out for more upcoming official XING events.

Bye bye OPEN Business Club AG, welcome XING AG - Today (June 13th) the OPEN Business Club AG held its first Annual General Meeting at the Exhibition Hall Convention Center in Hamburg Schnelsen. It was a big success, both for the shareholders and the company. Perhaps the most major proposal on the agenda today was the change of our company name from OPEN Business Club AG to XING AG. The result was clear: Over 99.9 percent of the shareholders supported the name change.

This is what our AGM backoffice looks like

Lovely support from the XING team

You can find all information concerning the AGM including the speech by our CEO here and here.

Now it’s official:                                                                                                                                                   

OPEN Business Club AG will be taking part in the NETSOCCER Beach Clash 2007 for the second time,  with an unbeatable team of fearless soccer fans.

And we won’t just be looking to defend our fantastic performance
last year. This time around, we’ll be playing to walk away with the winning trophy!!! :-)
                                                                           

The first 15 books were gone in 4 minutes: Today we started giving away free copies of  "XING - Das Buch" to the XING Ambassadors and XING moderators. While the Ambassadors got free copies to give-away at their up-coming live events, the moderators could apply on behalf of their group.

The first five speedy moderators who responded to today’s posting in the moderator group received three copies for their groups. They will be up for grabs in a little XING quiz - so make sure you keep an eye out for the quiz in your group.

If you missed out this time – don’t worry! We’re giving moderators two more chances over the next six days to get their hands on these sought-after books, which have even been signed by Lars Hinrichs himself.

Music and aural elements: how and why can they be used for internal corporate communication? I looked into this question last year while writing my diploma thesis entitled “Music in internal corporate communication”. The task of incorporating music and aural elements into an internal corporate culture has proven to be much more difficult than it seemed to be at first. If music is to be used in a corporate setting, there are numerous aspects which need to be kept in mind to make sure that both employee and employer are satisfied.

As it was, it took me all of a year to arrive at that conclusion. It all started when I was looking for a suitable research topic for my diploma thesis. At the time, I hadn’t yet found a subject area which truly piqued my interest. Then, while searching the ‘Net, I came across a research position on a topic that immediately caught my attention, namely “Music in internal corporate communication”.

Eureka, I thought. I’d found a topic that I was interested in, and which also happened to be one that had not yet received a lot of attention by students in my discipline.  I submitted an application for the position, and was accepted immediately. I started my research right away, working with the support of an agency which helped me with research and in suggestions for drafting an outline.
As my research progressed, my attempt at examining the topic from the perspective of communication management proved to be an extremely difficult task. Not only did I have to examine the aspects of functional music, it was even more essential that I focus on determining which roles music and other aural elements can play in corporate social networks and communication processes.

It turned out that by focusing my thesis as I did, I was treading radically new paths for my course of studies and my own skills. The practical result of being a pioneer was that I had to delve into completely new academic disciplines, and continually work at convincing my professor of the validity of my approach and hypotheses.

Unsurprisingly, the research and writing process was fraught with a plethora of irritations, not to mention stress. Despite the difficulties, however—ranging from a lack of professional literature on the topic (the greatest obstacle) to differences of opinion with my readers (the second most serious) to a lack of time—in the end I was able to write a thesis that while not earth shaking, is one I’m proud to show others, and which may well help shed some light on the use of music and aural elements in internal corporate communication.

For more information:
http://www.ac-g.de/
http://www.audio-branding.de