Reid Hoffman: LinkedIn About Face (book)
Who DOESN’T want to be the next MySpace, or Facebook!
LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye continues to put on a good “we’re no Facebook face,” even as the company founded by Facebook “angel” Reid Hoffman is now succumbing to the Mark Zuckerberg view of a social graph world, and confusion between professional business development and online socializing continues to reign in the blogosphere.
Venture Beat’s “LinkedIn, a better busines social network” is typical of Monday’s blog headlines which helped serve up the latest LinkedIn PR spin, while recycling overblown cliches: LinkedIn has just launched its own developer platform and a new design that promises to make it more useful to its millions of business users. Earlier this year, many wondered if social network Facebook would overtake LinkedIn as a business network destination. Many professionals have started to use Facebook for networking — enjoying its more social features. LinkedIn’s new features now put it a step ahead of the competition.
TechCrunch seconds the LinkedIn “better” social/professional messaging: LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, is trying to establish itself as a better destination with a stronger presence on the web. As a better destination, LinkedIn would experience higher levels of user engagement and more page views, which in turn would translate into greater advertising revenue. With a stronger presence, the site would grab mind share away from rising competitor Facebook, which has already become a household name for many.
Contrary to VentureBeat’s sweeping, unsupported assertions, however, and TechCrunch’s predictive spin, the LinkedIn universe did not experience a dramatic reversal of fortunes on Monday due to a LinkedIn corporate communications push, as astute TechCrunch commentators have noted:
Wayne Smallman: LinkedIn doesn’t even qualify as a Social Network, certainly not in the strictest sense. If you look around, it’s just a glorified CV / resume, which offers member-to-member messaging. It’s merely the electronic equivalent of the inevitable post-event calling of people from the number on their business cards.
JeffC: Just checked out the new feature that shows headlines from around the web, and it offered nothing of interest to me. Zip. It announced “these are articles of importance” to my company, when they weren’t. I think the categories we choose when we make our profile, which are limiting, determine these Headlines. So if I chose ‘internet’ as the area I work in, LinkedIn’s algorithm decides all I want to read about is the latest enteprise software or Firefox update. I go to my tech blogs RSS feed for that. Show me an interesting article that someone in my network (or a degree further away) just posted/wrote, or something relevant to what I actually do. Otherwise, just another feature that adds little or no value.
In other (Dan Nye and Reid Hoffman) words, more unproductve online time wasters! Oddly, the seeming socialization of a professional LinkedIn brand is at odds with LinkedIn’s continuing “we’re no Facebook spiel.” Nye assures that LinkedIn is (still) “not a place where you waste two hours of your time trying to find a date.” Nevertheless, Nye and Hoffman are now trying to spur members to dedicate more daily time to LinkedIn, even at the expense of real world productivity.
Back in the who needs LinkedIn day (summer of 2007), I asked Hoffman to weigh-in on the Facebook vs. LinkedIn debate, SEE: Reid Hoffman On How LinkedIn Beats Facebook for Business, INTERVIEW.
Hoffman underscored to me the key philosophical and business model differences between the LinkedIn he founded and the Facebook he invested in:
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, LinkedIn 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.
Three months later, the LinkedIn about face is all about Facebook. Reuters on the LinkedIn “broad plan to revamp the service to fend off larger rivals such as Facebook”:
LinkedIn will borrow popular ideas such as Facebook’s “News Feeds” that will spell out the daily activities of their contacts as well as drag in relevant news stories from 10,000 publishers and blogs.
LinkedIn is also “borrowing” from popular ideas such as Facebook’s third-party application opportunites, on-site and off, but deeming their implementations the “intelligent” ones!
For example, according to Reuters, McGraw-Hill Co will link keywords, such as company names, to the LinkedIn service. Visitors to the BusinessWeek site, who place their mouse pointers over certain keywords will trigger a pop-up box detailing how many of their LinkedIn contacts are related to the company or keyword.
YAY? Not so fast, VentureBeat commenter Jin notes the inherent spamming enviornment that is LinkedIn:
Do i really want my profile to pop-up to friends-of-friends-of-friends in an event calendar or a keyword in an article? will it simply result in more ‘can you help me?’ spam?
At the end of the day, is LinkedIn but an unproductive spam magnet, after all? Professionals are asking each other just that, at real world, professional, high-stakes, networks, as I report in Deal Maker on LinkedIn: ‘What Do I Do With It?’
LinkedIn is racking up its roster of advertising-friendly online network “connections” by the millions. Viewing advertising, however, is NOT the type of “exclusive” connecting that gets real world deals done.
ALSO: Salesconx Will Monetize Your Rolodex: LinkedIn Beware? INTERVIEW and CED Tech 2007: 30 Cool Startups, But NO Facebook Apps and Google Zeitgeist: $200 University Payola AdWords Scam and Google Has Insomnia: Mrs. Manber Beats 21,300,017 SERP and AdWords!