LinkedIn is from Mars, Facebook is from Venus (but Mars sustains life)
October 28th, 2008 by Hugh Kennedy
I was taken by a piece from this week’s New York Times Magazine about a man who realized he had accumulated nearly 700 Facebook friends, invites them all to a party at a local watering hole near his home in Toronto, and is mildly mortified when only one person shows up.
The author wonders: have people stopped going out with offline, flesh-and-blood friends? Are Facebook ‘friends’ more coincidences?
To underscore this point, several people in our Cambridge office have tried to befriend a local man who bears the same name as a PJA colleague, a man who even looks vaguely like him. Both apparently receive frequent invitations from each other’s friends, and recommendations from the friendly Facebook algorithm. Closely scrutinizing this man’s picture is a bit like going back to your alma mater ten years later: you see versions of your old friends walking around, but not quite the genuine articles.
So is all this funny or faintly sad?
It’s amusing, certainly, but to me it misses a point. Both Facebook and its older, more professional sibling LinkedIn are increasingly tools for knowledge-sharing, networking (a practice that, despite likeminders’ distaste, is still widely employed) and introductions. With the lines dividing work and life ever sketchier and more fluid, the expectation of true friendships developing online is naïve and unrealistic. To use BtoB terms, Facebook and LinkedIn are about engagement, not making the sale.
Facebook is ideal for colleagues, friends who are also clients, and people in your test bed of connections who may be able to help you later (and vice versa), not to mention that girl from kindergarten who has just resurfaced in Iceland. LinkedIn has always seemed more of a digital Rolodex, jacket-and-tie sibling of Facebook. Example: I recently sent an invitation to a pretty impressive marketing director at a company we pitched and lost. Even so, within a week she had linked back to me, as if to say, It’s a small world out there. Who knows when our paths, etc.
And that more professional appeal is, according to a CIO piece published this morning, exactly why LinkedIn may stand the better chance of flourishing in the long run. Since it doesn’t rely solely on venture capital (not much of that left this year) or advertising (Facebook’s clickthrough tends to be significantly lower than industry average), it has a lot of legs going into this recession. It’s profitable now; Facebook may be profitable by 2011. LinkedIn can take advantage of social media techniques to form online customer focus groups, research groups, enterprise 2.0 applications and other forms of business social networking that Facebook can’t.
All this being said, what’s still missing for me in LinkedIn is the sense of being alive that Facebook offers. What is particularly good about Facebook – its “What are you doing right now?” function – is the way it brings moment-to-moment presence into the online social media equation. Which may explain why I continue to network and spend more time there than on LinkedIn, even if they are the profitable one.
October 28th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
The biggest problem confronting Facebook is how to manage their growth going forward and how not to become so diluted that people start tuning out and head off for whatever is the next big thing in social media, after all, Friendster was hot before Facebook was open to all and now I don’t know a single person that uses it.
LinkedIn does not have that focus problem as it is tuned to do one thing only, and that is to promote business networking. While I may not have a very strong relationship with many of my connections on LinkedIn, they are a network I have effectively leveraged into business opportunities
November 3rd, 2008 at 1:38 pm
I’ve often thought the same about LinkedIn, and to some extent, about Facebook. A colleague once noted that these two social networks are more archives than active conversations. Although, Facebook is more vibrant now with some advanced features (such as Wall-to-Wall).
I’d use a slightly different analogy. While LinkedIn is the business meeting and Facebook is the hallway conversation, Twitter is the cocktail party. You can make some pretty good connections in any of those locations – you just have to know how to conduct yourself while you’re there.