Social Networks for Professionals

The Wall Street Journal of all people had an interesting article recently titled Social Networking Goes Professional (free). While many of us are well aware on the professional social network LinkedIn, niche social networks aimed at professionals in specific industries are sprouting up almost on a daily basis. The WSJ article highlighted one of these networks, Sermo.com, a social-networking site for licensed physicians. There are over 25,000 doctors who use this site on a regular basis.

For a variety of reasons social networks for professionals have been slow to get slow started compared to those aimed at consumers. This is partly because employees have been wary of disclosing too much to potential competitors. Also, business users typically have less time to devote to socializing online and are willing to do so only if they believe they are getting a unique benefit from the site.

“Professionals are fairly protective about their social networks which they spend their whole lives to build,” says Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. He adds that the appeal of social networking is limited largely to industries where workers are fairly isolated from their colleagues on a day-to-day basis, like medicine, construction and sales.

Another professional site is immobile. This site is focused on the wireless industry and has about 730 high-level executives at cellphone makers, wireless operators and media companies. For revenue, immobile allows members to list promotions and ads in a special “marketplace” section for $2,000 a year.

In the coming months as Reuters is planning on launching a new social-networking service, tentatively named “Reuters Space,” for fund managers, traders and analysts. To pay for the service, Reuters is planning to charge a membership fees.

The social networks 2.0 will be much more niche or narrowly focused than their 1.0 brethren like MySpace and Facebook. Unlike earlier social sites whose monetary plan revolved around Google adsense, the 2.0 sites appear to be looking at things like sponsorships, membership fees or listing fees to generate revenue.