LinkedIn Needs to ReachOut
Professional networking service LinkedIn wants to emulate Facebook’s success by drawing users and applications through the use of a similar portal strategy. But LinkedIn’s best chance at success lies in doing just the opposite: reaching out to other web sites and applications.
LinkedIn announces personalized home page, Business Week partnership
Today, LinkedIn launches a new personal home page that provides a basic personalized news capability, along with modules showing where OpenSocial applications will go. They are also announcing a relationship with Business Week, their first partner for an external API.
LinkedIn’s new home page includes company news, network updates and customizable modules. The company news feed shows news articles about the company for whom you work, filtered by what’s most popular among your colleagues. The network updates show what your professional contacts are up to. And the customizable modules show how users will add OpenSocial applications to their home page.
LinkedIn, you’re no Facebook
The new home page looks like an attempt to create a professional version of Facebook’s one-stop-shop social networking site. But LinkedIn is no Facebook, despite rosy possibilities for next year. Facebook has found success in bringing people and applications to its site because it offers a rich social experience.
LinkedIn, on the other hand, has always been about recording and browsing professional networks, not building those networks. Building the relationships that LinkedIn displays happens elsewhere. Even with features like Answers and Introductions, which provide some person-to-person interaction, LinkedIn is currently more data store than social platform.
That data store has real value, but because it’s locked up on one site it’s far less valuable than it could be. If LinkedIn made itself the default way to keep track of and activate professional relationships, their service would be hard to beat.
LinkedIn ReachingOut
The new partner relationship with BusinessWeek shows how LinkedIn might reach out to succeed. When you’re viewing a Business Week article with the new LinkedIn feature, you can hover over a company name and find out how you’re connected to the company via your professional contacts.
This flips news personalization on its head. Usually, personalized news means a service recommends articles to you. In this version, articles you’re already reading are personalized by virtue of their association with your professional network.
Imagine if you could access your LinkedIn professional network from anywhere: your email (LinkedIn integration is already available in Outlook), Facebook, your instant messaging client, Twitter, your contact manager, and so forth. And I don’t mean just downloading a CSV file and then importing it by hand.
The limited news personalization capability that LinkedIn is offering on the new home page suggests another way LinkedIn could reach out. It could make professional profile, network and company data available for integration into RSS news readers. People could find out how they’re related to other people or companies they read about on blogs. Professional profile and network information could even be used by smart newsreaders to come up with feed and article recommendations based on the people, companies, industries and job titles in a user’s LinkedIn account.
The riskiness of not risking enough
LinkedIn isn’t moving forward aggressively enough to unlock the value of their data and services; they need to bring them to the places where professional networking happens. “We’re taking a measured path because our audience is a professional audience,” Senior Product Director Adam Nash told me. But successful professionals know that the biggest risk you can take is to be too cautious.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Hey Linkedin is becoming very cool now…..Like facebook even they are coming up apps but the apps related to business. since Linkedin is very professional they are not compromising on it….they are still keeping it that way. More than fun people join Linkedin for purpose. I came across this site from some of the Blog which say Linkedin can be accessed over the phone without internet. In fact with this service, Linkedin access will be even more convenient than ever.
http://modazzle.com/cms/modazzleLp1.html?channel=CM&camp=LinkedIn
This is a good move by LinkedIn else it was getting boring. I hope the would come up with more brilliant ideas to make their platform more interesting.
The LinkedIn beta version is very much promising and surely reaches out many more people. Hope they add more innovative features while biting up the web2.0 trend!
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sumanthkrishna
LinkedIn is the most closed and boring social network I have ever used. If they do not change Facebook will eat them.
Facebook won’t be able over to take LinkedIn’s position in business networking, for a simple reason: Facebook Platform
It’s openness opened the door for crappy applications, which make up aboit 99% of all applications, if not more, that just waste business people’s time. (I highly doubt that there are just 100 good applications in the platform!)
LinkedIn’s closed platform is very important, they should also be very strict when giving applications space in the newsfeed.
All in all, the recent weeks on Facebook with ever increasing application SPAM in the news feed and cluttered profile pages made me become a LinkedIn-fan more and more.
@ Sebastian Moser: Troo dat!
I use both LinkedIn and Facebook for different purposes and agree that LinkedIn is much, much more useful for business purposes. I’ve used it to get C level meetings on multiple occasions. Most of the people I meet with from LinkedIn are serious business folks who’d be unlikely to waste their time with the (fun but often useless) service that Facebook provides.
I would tend to agree with Anne that LinkedIn’s strategy should differ from Facebook’s. It’s OK to be “boring”. Many of the most lucrative businesses are boring.
I think that LinkedIn is doing a fine job. To me it is a useful tool. One new and interesting tool they added is the news feed.
Facebook, Orkut, MySpace: to help service providers find and bid for consumers:
Facebook, Orkut, MySpace to help service providers find, and bid for services to consumers :
a) If I indicate on my social networking site that I wish to travel from SFO->NYC for duration of month in economy class, then sites like Orbitz, Priceline, Cheaptickets etc should use this info and come up with the cheapest/short-duration quote for me, instead of me going to their websites individually.
b) Similarly, lets say I want to attend online traffic school in a particular county (and I enter my details on my social networking site profile page), and since the cost of this varies from $9 to $29, online traffic schools should come to my facebook account and bid for me, with the cheapest rates.
c) Insurance : For example, I have my profile on your social networking site, and I would like to buy auto insurance. Using my profile data and my actual details like car, driving history, car model, etc (that I can make available on your social networking site under profile), insurance companies should come up with the best quote and let me know. Instead of me going to tens of insurance companies websites and getting quotes, they should be able to come up with direct quote for me.
Thanks, Avinash
http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.contact
http://groups.google.com/group/orkut-help-suggestions/post
http://www.facebook.com/help.php?tab=suggest
The big mistake is thinking of LinkedIn as a social network site. It is not social! It is a great online tool for managing and leveraging business contacts for business purposes. The recent enhancements have been great, and I’ve had great success in connecting with people and researching companies and job opportunities. If I want to engage in an interesting online discussion or connect with my social network, I’ll logon to Facebook.