The original concept of a social network, or any online community, was to bring together individuals with a common interest or background for discussion, enjoyment and business. After a while, social network sites – LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, XING, etc – realized that they could maximize profit by offering one site, or platform, on which lots of interest groups could create their own connections and discussion areas.
Long tail web sites win, end of story? Not quite.
Industry social networks are (re)emerging in force. They’re driven by:
- The clutter people are experiencing on sites like LinkedIn. Your own home page is now populated with ads, promotions for add-on applications, groups/chats with mixed value and mainly self-marketing, and updates about scores of people you may have linked to (but don’t want to know when they link to someone else, and you haven’t bothered turning off this feature). I’m personally in the midst of spring-cleaning all the add-ons that LinkedIn and Facebook have spawned on my screen.
- The fact that many professionals are more comfortable with an industry-backed approach than a open-to-the-public platform. Several law firms have indicated concern about connecting with colleagues on LinkedIn because it might give away information about client relationships, though they don’t have a specific regulation of issue to point to. Doctors who are colleagues of mine have rarely tried the online networks and don’t see much potential for business from them.
- Finally, industry-specific platforms have the ability to offer much more value through structured interactions. For example, consumer product designs can jointly suggest ideas for a product design in a CAD/CAM type of model, and green technology engineers can share plans and spreadsheets in ways that can be duplicated or compared across projects.
Here are fast-growing examples of industry specific networks in law, technology, medicine and green technology/sustainability.
For Lawyers:
- Martindale, the Lexis/Nexis database of law firms and attorneys has quietly launched a Connected platform for its members (read an early review). A corporate attorney who is refreshing and expanding her business contacts tells me that the power of Martindale is that practically every lawyer is already listed in the system – you can easily learn the whereabouts of law school alum or colleagues from a prior practice, and connect. In comparison, for my work with trademark lawyer, only 20% of her contacts are already in LinkedIn and we both feel it’s intrusive to tell other colleagues to join LI just for the sake of connecting.
- Martindale’s venture compares with other, startup firm-driven social networks for lawyers. Legal Onramp features a repository of legal ‘shareware’ documents and a carefully selected list of bloggers/forum hosts on topics like intellectual property, instead of the free-for-all on public social networks that breeds creativity but also a lot of useless promotion. Then there’s the JD Supra platform for sharing and collaborating on legal documents.
For Doctors:
- Sermo is a highly popular platform, originally created for doctors to share questions and recommendations for patient care. So far it’s more about the many forums on individual topics and cases than about networking with colleagues per se, but the fast and informal interactions seem to be creating new bonds between specialists in the same field who don’t already know each other. And Sermo is beginning to generate revenue polling doctors for the benefit of drug investors and others. The time seems ripe for doctors to band together not only on medical practice issues, but on changes to national healthcare policy as well.
For the green sector – clean energy/environmental sustainability
- 2degrees is an active network whose name is a play on (a) the need to prevent the earth’s temperature from rising more than 2 degrees celsius to prevent catastrophe and (b) a friend-of-a-friend in a social network. 2degrees seems to be effective at bringing together professionals from a diverse set of businesses and scientific/NGO domains to popularize solutions to the world’s environmental challenges.
These cases suggest that both larger organizations like Lexis Nexis and startups can achieve momentum building industry-specific social networks. They become much more sticky when the interactions go beyond mere connecting and text discussions to what I call “transactional social networks”, where the business process or workflow of an industry is re-invented to be performed in parallel by larger groups. This is akin to the Open Source movement in technology of the early 2000′s, in which one of my consulting clients CollabNet created a white label platform for other companies to build their cross-company, software developer networks.
Another industry ripe for semi-open social networks is institutional finance – among private equity and VC investors, high net worth individuals, investment research users, and others.
More on clean energy and financial networks in coming posts…
