Social Strategist - Online Strategy & Innovation: Business Networking Victory: LinkedIn or Facebook?

Business Networking Victory: LinkedIn or Facebook? · 08/27/2007

LinkedIn is smarter than a lot of people are currently giving them credit for. Compared to Ryze and some other business-focused social networks, they’ve put together a really well-developed site. I can’t blame them for being caught off guard by Facebook suddenly going from a college student network to the next hot business trend with platform potential.

For business networkers, the fate of LinkedIn vs. Facebook will depend on a few things:

Facebook’s giving users the ability to display their profiles to people in different contexts. Professional contacts see one set of information, personal contacts see another.
Facebook making an effort to actually make their service fit business uses. The “how do you know this person” options have been commented on a lot as an example of Facebook not having a clear idea of how professional relationships are distinguished from other kinds.
LinkedIn’s ability to not only deploy a developer network, but make that network better for business uses than Facebook’s. That means creating special data sets and variables for things like places of employment, references, skills listed, etc.
LinkedIn must deploy better group options. This is one of the few things Ecademy does better than LinkedIn, and they don’t even do it that well. The current options for creating LinkedIn groups are almost invisible. The most active user community discussions around LinkedIn are happening on Yahoo! mailing lists. When users have to go to a different service to talk with each other about your service, you’re doing something wrong.
LinkedIn must not replace their old plan, they must integrate it with the new plan. I’m sure the old plan had things like getting partnerships with business-service companies, organizing real-world networking groups, and better developing the knowledge-sharing aspects of their site. Hopefully, those ideas have not been placed on the shelf while they focus on developing their online offerings to compete with Facebook. They can’t just be catching up, they need to get ahead. And to do that, they will have to work twice as hard. Tough. That’s what it takes.

This post is originally from a comment I made on Mashable.

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Speaking of which, have you seen this article at the WSJ Tech blog?

http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2007/08/27/social-networks-for-everything/

— Con von Hoffman · 08/27/2007 02:22 PM · #
Thanks for the link, Con.

I’m actually of the opinion that niche social networks are a bad idea in a lot of cases. People aren’t one-dimensional, and while we may each have one particular thing we’re most obsessed with, the likelihood is that we all have a lot of other interests we’d like to be able to express as well. Building a new profile on a new site for each interest will quickly lead to social networking burn-out.

Also, for a lot of niche interests, a social network by itself is pretty useless. People need something to do other than browse profiles, and there aren’t enough conversations generated by people willing to message someone new and say, hey, did you see that cool thing at [link]? Jaiku founder Jyri Engeström gave a great speech about “social objects” that explores the idea of what really gives social networks their draw: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8660680426020413852

Most niches are better served by content sites that have partnerships or some kind of interaction with the physical world expressions of a particular interest, and that have social network features incorporated into them that supplements the site rather than trying to sustain it. Ideally, each niche site should use an open authentication system like Open ID, and a shared profile format(microformats need to evolve past the hCard to address this need, or someone needs to resurrect FOAF). That way, members of the car-enthusiast-niche-network can easily sign up for the boat-enthusiast-niche-network, then update their profile from either site.

— Jay Neely · 08/27/2007 03:19 PM · #
Jay,
I read your comments on Mashable and I must say I agree with you. They are preparing hard for this challenge they must deal with. I’ve been talking with some people at Linkedin and they are trying to their best and most important, they are waiting for user and developer comments to build a developer oriented API I guess. Good post and if you are interested about Linkedin and its future just take a look at my blog at: http://sociallinkedin.wordpress.com/
— Fernando Aramburu · 08/28/2007 10:04 AM · #