Casual Friday for Online Networking

By Liz Ryan, 8-29-07

The online networking scuttlebutt for six months has been that LinkedIn users are migrating to Facebook. Of course, Facebook was built for college kids, but they’ve figured out that their site works really well for business networking, too. I had set up a Facebook profile ages ago - so long that I’d forgotten my password, in fact - so I went back to refresh it and mosey around a little in Facebook based on all the Linkedin-to-Facebook hype.

This much is obvious: Facebook is more fun than LinkedIn. It’s colorful and it has photos - not only the users’ own mugs in their Profiles but also the Photo Albums they get to set up. Facebook is more silly. You can pick a yellow smiley (or frownie, or vomit-y) face to show how you’re feeling, and you can write on your Friends’ Walls and they can write on your Walls, and you can visit the site multiple times a day to say what you’re doing. And this is interesting. I have these ‘what are you doing’ entries coming via feed into the sidebar on my screen, only they’re coming courtesy of my daughter’s Facebook account, not mine. My daughter is fourteen, so the entries read like this: “Jenny Smith is horrified that four of her friends would vote her Most Likely to Have a Blonde Moment.” (I forgot to mention the Facebook application called Superlatives, that lets you nominate your friends as “most likely to run into a tree” or what have you). These what-are-you-doing notes might be obnoxious, but they’re not - they’re sort of interesting. If I were fourteen I’d be amused. As I start having my own Friends on Facebook, I could see that functionality (like Twitter) providing a nice little info stream during the day.

Facebook doesn’t include Endorsements, a major feature of LinkedIn. There is an add-on Endorsements appllication for Facebook, but it’s not built in. The Wall is a nice feature - you can post a note that your profile’s visitors will see, and you can change it at any time. It would be nice if LinkedIn had that feature. After you use Facebook for awhile, LinkedIn seems kind of static.

I know some users who view Facebook as their social-social networking tool and LinkedIn as their business-social networking tool. For me, that defeats the purpose of social networking. We are us, business is part of life and vice versa, so segregating the two halves via profiles on separate sites seems sort of goofy. Plus, it’s the Internet. It couldn’t be any easier to find out anything about you that a person wants to know. Still, segregation of interests aside, I see the benefits of belonging to LinkedIn and Facebook simultaneously, at least at this juncture. Most of my connections on Facebook so far are under thirty years old - my castmates from “Man of La Mancha” at CU this summer and the new MBA students whom I met at the Leeds School new-MBA orientation last week.

But the LinkedIn and Facebook worlds are colliding, no doubt about that. Maybe we’ll all relax a little and having a little more fun with our business networking. God knows, that couldn’t hurt.