SubscribeWSJ looks at the rise of professional social networks; offers tips
In Social Networking Goes Professional, Jessica Vascellaro of the Wall Street Journal looks at the rise of social networking sites for specific professions like Sermo.com for licensed physicians, INmobile.org for high-level executives in the wireless telecom industry, AdGabber.com for anyone interested in advertising, and Reuters Space (tentative name) for customers of Reuters.
Until recently, social networks have been slow to take off in business, and in the article Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski offers one explanation for the slower growth: “Professionals are fairly protective about their social networks which they spend their whole lives to build.”
I think this is changing dramatically.
I don’t look at my social network as a closely guarded stack of business cards that I’m reluctant to share. Because social networking sites make it so much easier to keep in touch with people I already know and connect with new people in an environment where we can easily share information about common interests, I can build my social network faster, and I have more incentive to be open because it’s just as easy for anyone else to build an equally robust network.
Of the sites profiled, the only one whose membership policy I don’t like is INmobile.org. It restricts membership to, “director-level employees and above from large companies, top-level executives from smaller companies and vice-president level and above from midsize businesses.” I think the wireless industry is part of the elite club of industries whose executives are way out of touch with consumers (along with movie studios, media conglomerates, and record labels). Do they really need an insulated social network where they can stay out of touch? That just seems to create an echo chamber where people will blindly reaffirm the same misguided ideas that result in expensive contracts that are hard to get out of, locking phones to specific carriers, and the extreme difficulty in using a mobile in other countries (including sky-high rates and fees hidden in the legalese that no-one reads). The point of social networks should be to build broad and varied personal networks that are sources of varied knowledge, viewpoints, and ideas.
my 2 euro cents,
-Stefan"
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