Reid Hoffman On How LinkedIn Beats Facebook for Business, INTERVIEW
Robert Scoble and Jeff Pulver have pledged their business allegiance to Facebook, big time: Scoble has accomplished his 5000 Facebook “friend, fan and enemy” accumulation mission and Pulver has achieved Business Week fame by publicly “confessing” his fraternal feelings for Facebook, while “leaving LinkedIn behind.”
What does LinkedIn co-founder, chairman and presidentof products Reid Hoffman say about the summer of blogosphere love for Facebook?
Many of the bloggers don’t really understand the use case for LinkedIn.
How so? I spoke at length with Hoffman yesterday to get to the bottom of LinkedIn vs. Facebook: Who means business more?
I asked Hoffman how it could be that a tech savvy blogosphere doesn’t get LinkedIn: “The Facebook use case is easier to grok, easier to understand,” he told me.
For Hoffman and the LinkedIn team, it is “obvious” that LinkedIn is different. Once bloggers understand the business differences between Facebook and LinkedIn, the atmosphere will not be “so controversial,” Hoffman indicated.
Why is Facebook NOT good for business? A “lightweight” people seach functionality, for starters, according to Hoffman; i.e., when searching for people at Facebook, a picture is the only information returned.
LinkedIn people search, on the other hand, is an immersive, in-depth experience that allows for profile-driven, granular drilling-down that enables business people to locate other business people with the skill sets and experience welll suited for targeted, business needs.
Looking for an open source expert to comment on Google’s open source philosophy? Peruse LinkedIn profiles of open source technologists with prior Google work experience, for example.
For Hoffman, the general Facebook experience is a lightweight, one to many environment: “Sixty percent of Facebook page views are for photo sharing,” he told me.
LinkedIn is for professional problem solving, Hoffman underscored: ”Facebook is horizontal, LinkedIn is vertical,” he said.
While Facebook is used by bloggers to push out their own media to as wide a circle as possible, ”most professionals don’t want an open door policy,” Hoffman told me. The 3,414 CEOs that use Linkedin every day, notably!
Who else uses LinkedIn? Key decision makers: 14,000,000+ Professionals and 500,000+ Senior Executives with an average experience level of 15 years.
Linkedin welcomes over 230,000 new Professionals every week representing average household income of $130,000+. All of the Fortune 500 companies are represented within LinkedIn membership.
In Web-based social networking, six figure Fortune 500 execs seek the discretion and confidentiality that LinkedIn uniquely offers, Hoffman told me.
While bloggers may extol the virtual sociability of an anything and everything goes open blogosphere atmosphere, a professionally run, online “gated referral network” is invaluable in the real world of high-stakes business, Hoffman indicated.
What else doesn’t the blogosphere get about LinkedIn? Reid Hoffman is NOT playing copycat or catch up vs a vs Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 platform.
Hoffman indicated his appearance at Supernova 2007 in June was misrepresented and misreported, by bloggers.
In other words, headlines such as Ducan Riley’s TechCrunch: “Linkedin to open platform in response to Facebook” and claims such as Dan Farber’s ZDNet: LinkedIn would “deliver APIs for developers, ostensibly to make it more a platform like Facebook, and create a way for users who spend more time socially in Facebook to get LinkedIn notifications” are flat out wrong.
Hoffman told me that LinkedIn had been working on APIs long before Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 announcement. What’s more, Linkedin has no desire, or need, to reformulate itself in the Facebook platform image.
Contrary to the blogosphere feeding frenzy of June–i.e. TechCrunch assertion that while “LinkedIn isn’t dead yet” it “faces the real risk of long term irrelevance”–itching for a LinkedIn vs. Facebook showdown, a LinkedIn emulation of Facebook’s platform model would be contrary to Reid Hoffman’s consistent vison for the professional networking utility that is LinkedIn.
While Facebook looks to its F8 application partners to provide apps that “engage” Facebookers, i.e.keep users within the closed Facebook Intranet as long as possible to drive page views fueling Facebook ad revenues, LiinkedIn enhances user loyalty by making the LinkedIn experience as fast and efficient as possible.
LinkedIn’s revenue drivers are subscriptions and job listings, Hoffman told me. Not only does LinkedIn NOT seek to rope in its users online, LinkedIn measures its success by how many real world OFFLINE connections it heps create, such as job interviews and businees meetings.
What will the LinkedIn APIs look like then? LinkedIn’s “hack” with SimplyHired.com perhaps.
In 2005, SimplyHired and LinkedIn teamed up so, among other things, “SimplyHired users can utilize the LinkedIn network to find inside connections at companies listed in SimplyHired.com serch results.”
Gautam Godhwani, CEO SimplyHIred, said:
What people really want is to make job search simpler, they want just one place to go and discover all the jobs available to them. That one place is SimplyHired.com. Now with access to the LinkedIn network, job seekers can also discover who they know inside a company and make their job search faster and easier.
Is it really “not what you know, but who you know,” now more than ever?
With LinkedIn, professionals can know more other professionals and know more about them, then they can at Facebook.
THANKS REID!
ALSO: Jeff Pulver Grows Old on Facebook: Many Happy (non Business) Returns