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Perils and travails of social networking

David Coursey’s deeply skeptical article from back in August, Beware of ‘Free’ Services, captures a subtle objection to some of these social networking sites. As Coursey says, everything has a price - whether obvious or implicit. I share his deep suspicion of Plaxo - the lame company which offers to spam customers’ contacts with arbitrary email requesting that contacts update their info. This is a personal predjudice, but I have to confess that I tend to think poorly of anyone associated with Plaxo’s email. As a non-user, it’s worse than spam - it tells me someone else has shared my info with a 3rd party. Not to mention the fact that it implicitly says I am valuable to that person only as a correct email address in their database. Maybe Plaxo could fix it by adding a chattier tone to the notes, but its request to ‘please update my info so that so-and-so has it correctly’ leaves me cold.

Services like LinkedIn however do suit me - I use LinkedIn quite a bit. For me it serves as a mental map of my contacts. My outlook contacts are too extensive and fragmented by the categories that I use to classify them locally. LinkedIn serves a useful purpose as a sort of superset category of something that could be classified as ‘people to keep my eye on’.

It could be my position as an itinerant researcher, but I’m not at all bombarded with requests for contact (or then it again, it could be that, as I sense, my network is already interlocked - that would be an interesting analytic tool for LinkedIn to add). I haven’t used it to make contacts either, as I have nothing to sell and usually get information from relationships I’ve developed in the real world. So, for me at least, the business case of LinkedIn in forming new connections has fallen short. It has helped me keep track of and keep in touch contacts I’ve formed elsewhere.

I heard (or read? I forget) that a possible business model for LinkedIn was selling companies access to “the references that are not on the resume” people with whom you have worked, but explicitly did not list as references. Now, how they would sell that access I’m not sure (it sounded more reasonable before I got to putting it down here) - but in that case, I agree that it would be a valuable thing. It’s so costly to mishire that I believe it’s economically benefical to reduce uncertaintly. On the flip side prospective employees can mine LinkedIn to get a sense of the culture and even the personalities of some of their potential colleagues. It’s on the same scale of reasonableness as Googling dates to get the backstory on them. With the data out there, we are better off knowing.

And that’s where I come down on Coursey’s objection - I am ok with the risk as long as I can extract value as a user. Fail to deliver me value, and the contract is broken.

The other social networking companies have failed to interest me. I deemed Ryze worth trying until I realized that I needed to pay $10 a month to get the sort of data I wanted out of it (it is free however to submit a tremendous amount of personal data, and it is free to get contacted by those in your affiliations 0 se here for more info). Friendster is for dating and pure social stuff - and the hype around that one crested when I was deeply skeptical about it as a popularity contest. Tribe might be interesting, especially in light of their partnership with (someone I’m interested in), but then again - it’s a matter of time. I can only invest so much attention in these services. And then there’s Tribe - but you know - I have never figured out what that’s for.

But all this is so much work, and requires investment. Take the last 2 days, for example - it took me the better part of yesterday to input my 60 new contacts into Outlook (granted I was addled with a bad cold). Today I spent time sending followup notes and invites into LinkedIn. While social networking tools make this process easier to tackle in a bulk fashion, they don’t do anything to mitigate the fact that dealing with people on the one-to-one level that is so essential to building and maintaining solid relationships. And that takes time.