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Social Networking—Not Just Greasy Kid Stuff
August 4, 2008

About eight months ago or so, I started getting strange e-mail messages (well, stranger than some of the ones I get), in which colleagues have invited me to be part of their social network on something called LinkedIn. I had never heard of LinkedIn, and for a while kind of ignored these requests, until one day I decided to investigate.

Wikipedia—assuming it can be believed, describes it thus:

[A] business-oriented social networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003 mainly used for professional networking. As of December 2007, its site traffic was 3.2 million visitors per month, up 485% from the end of 2006. As of May 2008, it had more than 24 million registered users, spanning 150 industries.

Think of it as MySpace or Facebook for grown-ups. (Plaxo is a similar business-oriented site.) The principle is basically the same: you create a profile and add “friends” (hopefully), but the emphasis, instead of social activities, is on business activities. There is blogging, but instead of yammering about what you and Rachel did at Josh’s party last Saturday, it’s what business activities you are working on. You can ask questions about business (in general or specific to your industry), look for jobs in your industry, get marketing tips, and basically network with others. I was at a conference a couple weeks ago and ran into a colleague who was a proponent of LinkedIn and he told me that if you are looking for interview subjects, contacts in specific types of businesses, or other individuals that you don’t know personally, often you can find them among your network’s network. It’s kind of like having an immense Rolodex at your fingertips.

And the service is expanding. This item appeared in my Interactive Advertising SmartBrief last week:

NYTimes.com is working with LinkedIn on targeting news stories and ads at their respective readers and members, the two said in a joint announcement. For the past few months, LinkedIn has been forging partnerships designed to expand its offerings beyond just connecting people through their jobs. In March, the company signed a similar deal with BusinessWeek.com that connects the mag site’s news to the jobs and associations of LinkedIn members and their network.

Even one Folio: magazine column declared, “Social Networking: Here to Stay,” and described how publishers (Folio: magazine is the major trade publication for the magazine publishing industry) can—and can increasingly be expected to—take advantage of social networking.

I personally have yet to take full—or any, really—advantage of LinkedIn or other social networking sites (althiough two or three years ago I did have a MySpace page for about a week but really found it kind of...well, boring), so it may sound a bit dodgy for me to advocate social networking for general marketing purposes. But I am continuing to experiment, and that I think is the key to eventually working with all of these items successfully: not being afraid to experiment, to dive in and just start playing around. After all, it’s free. Whether social networking is the fad du jour and in two years’ time will be a footnote in the history of technology, well, that’s certainly possible, but they said the same thing about the Internet in 1993. (What was the operative quote—it was “CB radio with typing?”)

As I have always said vis-à-vis long-term media trends, look at what kids are doing, because they are going to bring their habits with them into adulthood. Students—high school and college—have made sites like Facebook the center of their lives, and that is how they interact with their peers (not everyone of course, but I would dare say a substantial majority). That likely won’t change once they graduate. When I was a teen, way back when, the hot media were Sumerian cuneiform tablets— okay, I’m not that old, but the media I was exposed to and preferred in my formative years are still those that I use and prefer. I just can’t carry as many stone tablets as I used to.

Social networking has a valuable role to play in business today, and while it’s tempting to be ornery and just dismiss it as “kid’s stuff,” we may be doing so at our peril.

Posted by Richard Romano on August 4, 2008 | Comments (0)