Linda Cheung (20 February 2013)

Linda Cheung receives an eco-mouse from BBE students

From the very start of the talk it was very clear that Linda Cheung was from a corporate background. She had worked for thirteen years at Morgan Stanley but had always known she would at one point like to run her own business. Upon deciding to leave she was not sure exactly what she wanted to do and social media was not something she was particularly familiar with.  Within two years she had founded her own social media company called CubeSocial.  This was ranked one of the top 20 start-ups of 2011.

In terms of the most popular social media currently on the market she made some interesting analogies. She described one’s LinkedIn account as a virtual shop front for other users to have a look into – before her career at CubeSocial she thought of it as an online CV. Linda Cheung views different social media platforms as different social settings. She compared Twitter to a virtual cocktail party where people can dip in and out of conversations and make interactions with new people.  In comparison to this, Facebook, she says, is more like a house party where the dress code is more casual and there is a greater sense of loyalty to that person or entity. She advised us that when using platforms such as Twitter it is important to be personable, but you should tweet “as though your grandmother was reading it”.

She suggested that as business owners is important we identify what platform people most want to listen to us on. This means it is better to focus more on one area of social media and get a lot out of that rather than spread one’s business thinly across all platforms.

(based on an article by Alexander Levy)