Networking for business – jostling for position
Jinfo Blog

6th December 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Think social media for business and you probably think LinkedIn. But LinkedIn is not alone, and faces both actual and wannabe challengers. Not before time, perhaps, LinkedIn is now offering publishers and bloggers a Share button (http://digbig.com/5bdbac). Comments suggest that it’s having some teething problems, but once it settles down there’s the intriguing question of what sorts of things LinkedIn people will want to share. Perhaps they’ll want to demonstrate how well read they are, in which case another LinkedIn innovation may help. eBookshelf from the FT Press is a new LinkedIn application that allows members to showcase their business reading. As FT Press publisher Timothy Moore explains, they’ve developed a series of over 500 shorts – ‘essential reading for business success’, he claims, covering a wide variety of networking topics (http://digbig.com/5bdbad). But it’s by no means the only way to compress your business reading. GetAbstract claims to summarise ‘all the business books essential to your job and career’, adding five-page abstracts of some 50 titles a month, selected from among the 10,000 or so business books that it monitors throughout the year (http://digbig.com/5bdbae). As it happens, one book to feature in a recent GetAbstract summary is the 2009 offering Twitter Power by Joel Comm and Ken Burge, showing how you can harness Twitter to the benefit of your business and your brand (details of 2010 edition at http://digbig.com/5bdbaf). And Twitter too is anxious to entice business customers. It already has a business orientated service, Twitter 101 (http://digbig.com/5bdbag or see VIP LiveWire http://www.vivavip.com/go/e22493 for further background). But as the company’s chief executive Dick Costolo acknowledged in a recent interview with the Telegraph, Twitter still lacks a clear long term vision (http://digbig.com/5bdbah). Twitter has truly been developed by its community with their many and various requirements, and you get the impression that it’s thrashing around a bit trying to find core markets of its own. One initiative it’s considering is a news network; Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told Reuters recently that this might run in partnership with established news organisations, helping journalists get in touch with people on the ground (http://digbig.com/5bdbaj). But if you don’t want to Tweet perhaps you can Yammer. The enterprise social networking specialist has just secured $25 million in its third round of funding, bringing its total financing to $40 million which it intends to invest in expanding its engineering team and its sales organisation (http://digbig.com/5bdbak). Yammer provides a secure internal network for the enterprise but claims to be as easy to set up as a Facebook account (http://digbig.com/5bdbam). It looks like a serious challenger to established enterprise networking solutions – and if you want to keep track of what it’s up to you can… follow it on Twitter!

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