Has Social Networking Reached Critical Mass? Part three of a 3 part series on Social Networking. August 22, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , trackbackHas Social Networking Reached Critical Mass?
Part three of a 3 part series on Social Networking.
By Mark Blei
Facebook, MySpace, Xing, Ecademy, Plaxo, Yahoo360, and the various and sundry failed Orkut type websites out there... I get invited to these every day. Today alone I was invited to two new social networks that I had not heard of before. One of them, called Quechup, which I luckily did not join, automatically harvests every email address in your files, and without permission spams everyone you know with invitations to join. ( That Link does not go to Quechup) Is there room for more than one social network for both business and personal use?
Probably. But just like six years ago when we had a host of search engines available to us- Excite, Lycos, Dogpile, Yahoo, Hotbot, and the new and upstart strangely named Google, the herd has a way of thinning itself out. How many of you even bother with anything more than Google, Yahoo, or the Microsoft search product if you need to search for something? When was the last time that you looked at a MySpace profile? The last time that I did any looking around that site, aside from noticing that Tom was a pretty popular guy, I noticed profiles that were pimped out so much that they were completely unreadable, profiles that blare music wantonly, waking up my entire house when I hit them. I do not think that the answer is necessarily allowing people to do whatever they want on their profile. Now I know that MySpace is not necessarily going after the 30 plus 50k demographic very heavily, but think about where the money is.
I do think that when I talk about Facebook ruling the world in terms of social networking that they have a very good chance of doing that, and I believe that all other social networks if they want to survive the next few years of the culling process should beware. If I find the experience of being on your website to be unpleasant, visually difficult, and intrusive, then I’m not only going to refuse to join that network, I won’t even bother visiting links that people send me on that network. If Google Video did not allow you to view MySpace videos within the Google Video portal there would never be any bandwidth dedicated to MySpace again from my PC.
LinkedIn, formerly the leader of business networking, has had long-standing customer service issues for even people paying the highest of premiums. And also, what is now being widely known as the “LinkedIn Lockout”. Well, ok it’s not really widely known as “LinkedIn Lockout” but I had to put a name to it and I thought it sounded cool. Who knows it might catch on.Pardon me if I’m wrong, but from my understanding, the purpose of networking sites like LinkedIn is to enable you to meet new people that you would otherwise not know in order to determine if there is any business synergy and to engage in possible deals. LinkedIn, in their wisdom, decided that they would put both an option within their invitations for the recipient to indicate that they did not know the person who was inviting them, and also made a rule saying that if 5 people pressed that button indicating that they didn’t know me, that I would lose my privileges to invite people into my network on LinkedIn, thereby effectively stagnating it. Of course they don’t know me. If they had known me, I wouldn’t have had to use the darned tool to send them an invitation to invite them to get to know me. If I had had their email address or phone number I would have contacted them that way. What’s worse is that once you enter the LinkedIn Lockout Zone, it’s virtually impossible to regain your invitation privileges.
This hasn’t happened to me because I only send invitations to those people who I know would have at least a name recognition of my company if not me, and people who while may not always be customers of mine are certainly by both our standards good candidates to be customers. Like any salesperson I don’t waste my time reaching out to unqualified people. But even if you have an existing list of contacts you can still get locked out! It’s happened enough that it’s already hit the Blogosphere like in this post by Blogger Scott Allen.Also, there is no real difference between a free membership on LinkedIn versus the top-level membership which costs almost $50 U.S. a month other than more chances to get yourself locked out of the system by trying to meet new people.
Meanwhile, easy to use applications like Xing are growing exponentially. Plaxo, who entered the social networking market earlier this month, is already a product that almost every person in my industry uses in one form or another, and has used for at least the past four years. I know 2 people who don’t use the Plaxo network, and that’s it. One is my wife and the other is my IT guy ( and I’m pretty sure my IT guy was lying to me). When Plaxo released their social networking tool, within 24 hours I received over 100 invitations from people within my Plaxo contact list to join the Plaxo Business Network. LinkedIn should be shivering in fear.
Is there room for more than one social networking tool? There may be. Look at the last 10 internet searches that you did. How many were on Google? How many were on Lycos? Social networking sites should learn from the past and realize that even the most savvy web-users are willing to give up a good deal, up to and including their privacy, for a good, reliable functionality, and dependable results. If we don’t learn from the past, it will only repeat itself.
This posting is a personal opinion article by Mark Blei who is in International Business Development for Dynamic Logic Inc and the author of this blog. None of the content of this article is meant to be an opinion of Dynamic Logic, It’s parent company Millward Brown or anybody but the writer.
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