LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner in the hot seat, trying to convince the audience that LinkedIn still matters in a Facebook world.
Don’t count LinkedIn dead… yet!
At the Demo Fall 2010 conference, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner woke up an otherwise sleepy audience, defending the unique values of his social network. LinkedIn is used by over 75 million professional users, and is adding 1 new user every second. “We connect talent with opportunity at massive scale.”
“There are primarily 3 value propositions [for LinkedIn].
- The ability to build your professional identity, your professional brand if you will. By virtue of creating a profile and having that profile search engine optimized, you’re going to show up at the top of search engine results. Especially if you’re maintaining a certain freshness to that profile. And the ability to carve out a piece of that digital real estate in this day and age and essentially presents to the world your experience and your skills, ultimately what you want to achieve, is pretty powerful dynamic and that creates opportunities.
- The ability to build, maintain and manage your network of professional colleagues, business contacts. Historically, when people thought of professional networking, they envision the guy at a conference handing out business cards as fast as he can. And today it’s very different. Professional network is essentially how business gets done. You’re relying on people within your professional network for the information and the knowledge you need to get effective and what you do; for more prospecting, certainly for recruiting, for closing all kinds of different deals. Essentially people who are relying on their network today are on a competitive advantage when compare to someone who’s not.
- The sharing and knowledge of information and data that enable to be more effective at the role you’re already in. And in this day and age, people are sharing so much more than they ever done previously. And one of our primary objectives is to extract as much relevancy from the information and knowledge flowing through it as possible. At LinkedIn we’re looking the signal from the stream.”
In social networking, critical mass matters, adds Weiner. “As far as the competition, I think there’s a lot to be said for critical mass when you’re playing a network game, you certainly want to tap the benefits and the power of the network effects.”
LinkedIn vs. Facebook
Interestingly, Weiner doesn’t see much overlap between LinkedIn and Facebook. And why would he? For the LinkedIn CEO, context matters when dealing with social networking, which for him facilitates connections between people.
“Facebook is a social utility platform largely oriented around connecting people very horizontally, very broadly speaking, across the Web. The killer application is largely oriented around personal applications, personal life, family relationships. Social gaming, status updates, sharing pictures.”
“LinkedIn is a professional network. It’s all about connecting you with business contacts and colleagues. And it’s all about creating an economic opportunity for you.
More on LinkedIn IPO plans:
Weiner on LinkedIn Company Profiles 2.0:
and LinkedIn’s future roadmap:
How Weiner uses LinkedIn:
