LinkedIn's Advertising Chief Tells Us How He's Going To Destroy Your Resume

Jonathan Lister is LinkedIn's vp/North American sales for marketing solutions, which means that he's in charge of growing the social network's brand advertising revenues.

It's a growing business—the company reported a 77 percent increase in ad sales to $50 million in Q4 2011.

We sat down with Lister recently in LinkedIn's regional office in New York, on the 25th floor of the Empire State Building (great views!). He told us how LinkedIn serves its clients, what kind of data it can offer, how it competes with Facebook ... and how LinkedIn could end up making your resume and your business card extinct.

Jim: Give my readers a broad overview of what you do and who you do it with.

Jonathan: So I run North America marketing solutions. Marketing Solutions is our line of business that sells to partners. So we connect members with branding opportunities. We do this at scale, we do it globally. I happen to run the business in North America. That business is predicated on lots of information that members have chosen to give us about who they are, their identity, and who they know, their graph. Professionally who they’re connected to – first degree, second degree, third degree.

Jim: And this is different from the hiring solutions side?

Jonathan: We have a line of business, Hiring Solutions, that sells to people who hire in the HR community. We have a line of business called Marketing Solutions that I run that sells to marketers. We also have a subscription line of business.

Jim: And you have a new business with heads of sales organizations?

Jonathan: We have a product that we sell into sales organizations, to heads of sales, that helps salespeople take advantage of some of the great things about LinkedIn. So specifically, one of the things it does is help people find people in organizations that they’re not connected to. It helps people find people they would like to connect to at another organization via people at their organization who they’re connected to. So what it does is it using the graph to find people at my company who are connected to someone that I would like to be connected to. In effect what’s it’s doing is helping businesses to eliminate the cold call. It’s creating warm calls.

Jim: So this is why sales people are obsessed with LinkedIn!