LinkedIn as Facebook for the Business World

(note, this post was cross-posted on It's All About Revenue last week)

I've long been a bit skeptical about the use of Facebook for sharing business content. It is a great medium for personal sharing, and works well when businesses hit on the rare, but brilliant creative campaigns that go viral because they are cute, funny, or whimsical. However, for content like whitepapers, it just does not work.

I'm currently running an experiment to see if B2B content is "likeable" on Facebook, and while I have not compiled the data yet, the answers are looking bleak.

However, interesting developments continue at LinkedIn, with their recent promotion of a sharing bookmarklet. The technology is really simple:

1) Drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar:


2) Click it to share any page you are on:

3) Your status is updated with that link:


But the implications are more interesting. By doubling their investment in the status update as a communication metaphor that Twitter and Facebook have leveraged with great success, LinkedIn seems to be attempting to become a similar communications hub for the business world.

Whether they will be successful in becoming "Facebook for the business world" is unclear, but there are a few factors in their favour, and a few against worth considering:

3 Factors working in LinkedIn's favour:
- their presence as the defacto network of business connections gets them over the hurdle of network adoption quickly

- their deeper knowledge of business profiles means that they can (theoretically) do a much better job of understanding influence networks than alternatives

- the gulf between our social selves and our business selves is probably implanted deep in the brain stem, and may be impossible for Facebook to overcome as an inherently "social" ecosystem


3 Factors working against them:
- they are late to the party when it comes to building a robust developer ecosystem to extend and innovate on the core

- their application usage scenario feels a lot more like a CRM system (looking up contact and company details) than a communication platform like Twitter or Facebook. Making this shift will be difficult

- Each network has an implied "hurdle" of becoming connected (Twitter is very low, for example). LinkedIn has historically been a relatively "high" hurdle, which doesn't lead to broad sharing of ideas through many loose connections


What's your bet? Will LinkedIn succeed with this initiative and become Facebook for the business world?

Market Relationships, Social Relationships, and B2B Marketing in Social Media

I just wrapped up a great book – Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely – that discussed, among many other things, the different relationship types we have between people; especially market relationships and social relationships. Dan’s example was a great one for capturing the essence of the challenge; you have a great Thanksgiving dinner with the family at your mother-in-law’s place, and everyone has enjoyed the great food, drinks, and conversation. The meal ends and you pull out your wallet to pay your mother-in-law for the great meal she has provided. Obviously a very awkward moment, and entirely the wrong thing to do.

Essentially, the situation becomes very awkward because you have flipped the relationship from one form (a social relationship) to another form (a market relationship). Neither type of relationship, by itself, is problematic. We provide and receive dinners based on our social relationships frequently, and we receive dinners based on market relationships each time we eat at a restaurant. However, it’s the flipping between the two that causes that feeling of awkwardness.

Social media, for all its promise, does not change the nature of the way we categorize relationships. It just makes those relationships more visible. One of the most common questions that comes up in discussions of B2B marketing is how social media can be used to drive revenue. It can, and there are many great examples of ways in which social media can be used to drive revenue, but none that I have heard of ignore the ways in which humans categorize relationships.

What I mean by that is that each of our presences on social media needs to fit neatly into a relationship category, or it will seem awkward. If we want to use social media to connect with friends, exchange photos, and share stories, great. If we want to use social media to educate, inform, and guide buyer behavior, that’s equally great. However, it is when we attempt to merge the two that awkwardness can result.

I’m not in any way saying that if you’re in a market relationship, you cannot be fun, engaging, and interested in a person’s family and personal life. You can, and it’s a great way to connect with people; in the same way that a waiter or waitress can be gregarious, social, and interesting. However, the relationship category is clear.

Many of the known successes in social media are clear market relationships. The team at Dell, ComcastCares, Chris Brogan, and the Kado Barbeque Truck are all clearly engaging us in market relationships within social media. They may be engaging, personable, and friendly, but there’s no awkwardness when they try to educate or guide our buying behavior, as we know from the start that it is a market relationship, and an ultimate goal is business.

If a social media strategy, however, relies on this boundary being crossed, it may face more of a challenge than you anticipate. Social media can be a great environment for ideas to spread virally. However, if those ideas would appear to change the relationship type, they will likely not spread. We forward viral videos to our friends that are funny, cute, inspiring, or provocative. These fit within a social relationship. We generally don’t forward videos that appear to be selling anything or promoting a product or company too strongly. This steps over the line into a market relationship.

Relationship types form an interesting framework to understand what allows certain messages to be forwarded and others to fail miserably. We have each seen examples of enthusiastic PR teams suggesting that we try to get everyone we know to pass along a great press release to their friends on Facebook. It does not work, as it is asking for a relationship (social) to flip to a different type (market). An interesting example, is the viral success that is seen in forwarding “friends and family only” discount coupons in retail scenarios. The sense that it is an internal only offer, rather than a sales promotion, allows people to pass it on in the context of a social relationship. Promotions that are just as strong economically, but do not have the “inside scoop” angle generally do not see the same level of success among groups in social media who mainly share a social relationship.

However, not all social media platforms are based on purely social relationships. People who connect on LinkedIn, for example, likely are sharing a market relationship, and may be more likely to share, discuss, and engage in pure business conversations. Twitter forms an interesting hybrid environment where both types of relationships exist.

Thinking about the relationships our initiatives are resting on allows us a new perspective on our social media campaigns. If the campaign relies on a social relationship becoming a market relationship, chances are it will not work. This transition is fraught with awkwardness and established etiquette, as much in the realm of social media as it is at Thanksgiving dinner at your mother-in-law’s.

The Medium is the Message: B2B Marketing, Social Media, and Conversation Context

Ever since Marshall McLuhan published his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, we have been familiar with the phrase "The medium is the message". The medium in which a message is delivered has as much of an effect as the content delivered in that medium.

Today's world of social media needs to be viewed in a similar light. The medium in which a message is delivered is as important to consider as the content of the message itself. As today's marketing organizations consider how to engage in social media forums, not considering the context of the medium being used can lead to a significant change in the overall effect on the message being received.

Social media sites are best compared to social functions in order to understand this effect of context. Like social functions, each social media context has a certain "vibe", which guides the conversation that is accepted.

If you think of this in light of social functions, it becomes clear that certain conversations are appropriate in certain social contexts, and not others. Business meetings are intended to be direct, on topic, and have an agenda-driven vibe. On the other end of the spectrum, parties have a social vibe and only social conversations are generally seen as accepted.

The use of social media for business shares a similar dynamic. The context guides the vibe, which guides the conversations that are accepted. Content of conversations cannot be understood separate from the context of the medium in which they are held.

I wrote recently about our Facebook B2B marketing strategy, which leveraged the context of the Facebook medium to guide the message being delivered. Facebook carries a very social vibe, and our goal with our Facebook strategy is to keep our conversations relevant to that context.

In the context of LinkedIn discussions as a medium, however, "talking shop" is much more expected and anticipated, so the messaging in that medium can be much more business oriented.

If a person at a party brings up a business conversation, or a person in a business meeting tells a party story, the audience is as much influenced by the out-of-context feeling, based on the medium, as they are by the content itself. It is the same in social media. A whitepaper on best practices may contain excellent content, but it is the context of the medium as much as the content itself that influences the audience.

When exploring B2B marketing in social media, understanding this context is critical to understanding how your message is received. McLuhan's prescient observation that the medium is the message is as accurate today as it was years ago.