The Business Web 2.0

LinkedIn adds apps in a move that seems to ape Facebook, but are strictly professional. The only problem is, they don’t work.

I am an avid LinkedIn new follower and Google Alerts gives me several stories a day to digest. Recently, I read a few bemoaning the way in which LinkedIn seems not to have developed any in spite of recent investments. Today, the soothsayers were silenced by a radical new addition to the LinkedIn business networking service: applications.

Now, if you’re thinking Facebook applications you will no doubt be delighted to read that sheep throwing and movie quizzes will not be something you have have to engage in with business contacts alongside your Facebook friends. LinkedIn’s applications are “productivity applications that range from gathering information that professionals around you are generating to enhancing your abilities to collaborate and communicate more effectively. You’ll be able to work much more closely with your contacts on LinkedIn” says founder and CEO Reid Hoffman in his blog.

Most are provided by external companies who have adapted their own services so they can run inside LinkedIn, but one developed by LinkedIn itself is Company Buzz. This tool enables you to see what is being said on Twitter about your company. It may be many people’s first foray into social media monitoring and if you ignore the fact that LinkedIn’s 30 million users are likely to be saying more about your company than Twitter’s 3 million users, it sounds like a useful application.

The problem is, it doesn’t work.

I just tried to add Company Buzz to my own LinkedIn profile and I got a message back saying it has technical difficulties.

Even when it does get to work, I am unsure how it actually is going to give me what it promises. LinkedIn says my Company Group is “Entel”, which is, in fact, a truncated version of one of my company names and not a company I work for at all (I already get irrelevant news headlines each time I log in). It completely ignores my current WeCanDo.BIZ entry. So when it does start to work I have a feeling it will be showing me Twitter entries for a company I don’t work for, and neither of the two I do.

Perhaps the real point is though, will these apps be enough to get the 30 million registered users coming back regularly?

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

Got a social network struggling to make money? How about climbing in to bed with a CRM vendor and charging businesses a fee to keep their data current?

It’s easy to get bored of reading press releases from social networking companies announcing new rounds funding. Okay, there is a little more novelty attached to them post financial market meltdown, but funding rounds still seems the only source of reliable income for way to many socnets.

So I could easily have written off LinkedIn’s announcement last week: the business focused social network raised $27 million blah blah. Except the detail was more interesting this time, as amongst the companies coughing up cash were SAP.

Now picture this: you use LinkedIn and have a few hundred connections, mostly buddies in former jobs. You go into LinkedIn to read what’s happening with them and connect up with the most recent joiners. But what if you could then press a button and the contact details for your whole network then move into your CRM system. As your relationship with those connections develops, SAP enables you to attach processes to them to ensure you achieve your objectives and no opportunities slip through the net. Neat. But best of all, all the customer records in your SAP are updated by the customers themselves! No more duff data.

This has made sense to me for sometime, coming, as I do, from six years in CRM to now run WeCanDo.BIZ, an online new business network for sales leads. When we launched in May, it was in the back of my mind that integration with CRM systems would be both simple and very compelling. Could LinkedIn be about to steal a lead?

Well, the SAP investment suggests I may not be alone in seeing this as a marraige made in heaven. I’m seeing the power of a system tapped directly in to public profiles where your target market and customers will happily maintain all their current contact details, as well as telling you their likes and dislikes (this could work just as easily on Facebook, where there is way more personal information to mine than there is on LinkedIn). So may SAP be, but I would imagine LinkedIn is seeing what it could charge SAP users for the live connection into its database.

So will SAP and LinkedIn set a trend? SAP isn’t the most prominent player in CRM: Oracle, Microsoft and young upstart Salesforce.com are all better established. The last of these is potentially better positioned to tap into online social networks, as it is a wholly online service itself. But who could Salesforce.com partner with? LinkedIn is out. Facebook is very consumer heavy although a large number of Salesforce.com’s customers are business to business. CEO Marc Benioff likes to innovate, so will Salesforce.com start their own social network (SocialForce?)? Well, with over half a million users they’d get a useful leg-up, but it puts them way behind LinkedIn or even European rival XING on 6 million users; non-Salesforce.com users would need good reasons to sign up to another social network.

Either way, I remain convinced that a connection between socnets and CRM is worthy of consideration by my company; and I doubt I’ll be the only one putting thought to it and looking for partners.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

WeCanDo.BIZ Business Networking Trends Survey reveals 92% would recommend their contacts network online.

The results of our recent survey on business networking trends reveals UK-based small business are avid supporters of online networking through sites, although some of the best known business-focused social networks aren’t doing enough to support the needs of the small business owner.

The survey was supported by over 250 participants, 83% of which were board level or proprietor, with 92% from firms with fewer than 50 staff, mainly in the UK (92%).

The most interesing findings:

- “Getting more business” was ranked most important reason for starting to network online
- 82% have a presence on business-focused networking sites like LinkedIn, Xing, Ecademy and WeCanDo.BIZ
- Two thirds say that networking online has brought them closer to their customers/intended market
- 59% have won customers or otherwise done business as a direct result of online networking sites
- 78% are open to purchasing from contacts made on such sites
- 92% would recommend their contacts network online
- More than half plan to increase their online networking activities, almost exactly the number who said they will increase their face to face networking going forward

Two VERY interesting pieces of information came out which I didn’t expect to see however. The first is that “Career advancement” was seen as the least important aspect of online business networking, directly conflicting with the core focus of professional networking sites LinkedIn and Xing. Both these sites represent members through a virtual CV and hiring or being hired are central to their offerings and key to why many people join. LinkedIn, with 25 million members, recently reported a surge in membership from staff being made redundant as a consequence of the recent banking crisis, presumably hopeful that new connections could be made through the site to get them back into employment quickly. LinkedIn seems not to offer the same hope for small business owners looking for new customers however.

The other interesting statistic is that business networking online is perceived as more effective in winning new customers than telephone sales cold calling, the backbone of new business lead generation campaigns since Alexander Graham Bell first stole the patent application. Telephone cold calling was ranked as sixth most important in generating new business, way below online networking, face to face networking and, indeed, web site optimisation.

The full report of results can be downloaded from the WeCanDo.BIZ website at http://www.wecando.biz/surveyresults.php.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

Amongst all the negative news on the collapse of Web 2.0, the first social network to go public doubles its revenues.

OK, so there is a large number of so-called Web 2.0 companies out there that amount to not much then a kind of neat idea, but certainly not a business. And the turmoil in the financial markets of the past two or so weeks has rightly got people asking questions on whether many of these companies can survive. I have, myself, commented at length on assertions coming out or both Twitter and Facebook that revenue isn't important as it's all about user numbers (I think this is nonsense if you haven't read my views).

But not all Web 2.0 companies should be tarred with the same brush. Many have solid revenue plans and some are even executing on them. XING AG of Germany even has to prove what it is doing after it went public in 2006.

And it's doing just great, thank you. Figures released today for the three quarters of the year so far show revenues nearly doubled, to 25 million Euros to September 2008 compared with 13 million for the same period in 2007.

Further defying the doom-mongers, XING also achieved a 9.47 million profit (EBITDA) on the back of its most profitable quarter for the year so far. Paying subscribers rose to 514,000, 8% of the total base of 6.53 million.

Although far behind LinkedIn's supposed 25 million members, LinkedIn remains a private concern which doesn't disclose financial performance. It is unlikely that the Mountain View, California based rival is achieving the same proportional revenue or profitability figures.

Xing manages an easy second in terms of European business focused networks if seen in terms of user numbers, with France's Viadeo third with around 1.5 million members. The UK's Ecademy has around 170,000 individual profiles, but only 7,500 paying members - just 4% alongside Xing's 8% of total paying membership.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

When I logged into LinkedIn today I found I have been punished for trying to network with new people I don't know.

Well, I say new people I don't know. I don't believe I have been using LinkedIn for what I would describe as the basis of business networking. Rather, I have used it for several years to reconnect with former colleagues before then sitting around wondering what I do with them.

But I can't do even this any more because my account is now restricted. I have to enter the e-mail address of the other member on LinkedIn before I can invite them to connect. Even former colleagues are just out of reach -- although LinkedIn itself tells me I used to work with these people by connecting us through a former company! What it gives with one hand, it takes away with the other.

So what has happened and could it happen to you too?

Well, it would seem that a number of people I have worked with previously, when they appeared linked to a previous employer, have forgotten who I am when they received my invitation to reconnect. Not a crime on either part. But the problem comes when they press the "reject" button in my invitation to connect because when LinkedIn sees this happen five times -- and I have 300 live connections, so this would mean fewer than 3% of them not quite remembering my name, even though they can see we worked for the same company -- it then stops me from connecting to anyone else, unless I have their current e-mail address. I am seen as spamming to stopped from doing it further.

It hasn't escaped me that if I had their e-mail address, I would already be able to connect to them away from LinkedIn of course...

Anyway, this is the message I now get:

"You cannot send invitations from this page because several recipients of your invitations indicated that they don’t know you. This safeguard is in place to prevent users from receiving unwanted invitations from people they don’t know. Customer Service can remove the restriction at anytime once you’ve indicated you understand the policy. Note that you can always invite another LinkedIn user by going to their profile and entering an email address."

I have said before that this policy on LinkedIn makes it counter-productive as a business networking site, akin to arranging a face to face breakfast networking event but warning each person who attends not to speak to strangers!

If life is this hard trying to network on LinkedIn with people it tells you you may know, how hard is it for using as a tool to broker valuable NEW relationships that aren't currently established? I suppose it's OK if you have one already established mutual connection in common, but what if it's more hops than that? Does anyone actually pass on invitations to connect when they know the requester and the target aren't known to each other? Especially when they know themselves, because LinkedIn tells them, that you should not connect to people you don't know.

LinkedIn continues to be big news because lots of people are on it, in much the same way that MySpace was a couple of years ago. But how long will it take people to get tired of just re-connecting with known people and start to crave a networking site where they can make new connections that are motivated by new business opportunities as opposed to sharing stories about past sales conferences?

It didn't take long for people to switch from MySpace to Facebook and what was perceived as a better range of useful tools. Could the business world's LinkedIn epiphany be just around the corner?

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz