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I am watching, as many others apparently are, to see how the LinkedIn IPO will fare this week. This is the first of the Social Media platform giants to hit the stock exchange, now to be offered on the NYSE, rather than on NASDAQ, as originally proposed.
I’m not only interested in the value of shares (Mashable has been covering this intently), but the whole question of whether social media will now have a new kind of legitimacy for the typical business leader, particularly over 35 or even 45 years old. This has happened at least twice before in the past 30 years: specifically, when Apple (back then “Apple Computer”) released their Apple II desktop computer with a spreadsheet application (Visicalc), the desktop computer for business use was made legitimate by IBM’s PC (crushing the field with Lotus 1-2-3 sitting on Microsoft’s plain-Jane operating system). The World Wide Web became legitimate for business first in the early 90′s with the Netscape browser, again to be superseded by Microsoft with Internet Explorer.
Colleagues and I joke about the “facebookification” of LinkedIn, or the Twitterizing of LinkedIn, but I would say there are two ‘killer apps’ hidden in the bowels of the LinkedIn world:
- Job Listings/Resumes
- Group discussions (with moderation)
These are not new application—Monster.com was a leader for a long time in the job hunter’s world. Craig’s list, the de facto Web classifieds (at least for the US) has been around for a while. But the combination of the online resume right up front in the business/working ethos of LinkedIn makes it easier to manage than both of these older stalwarts.
However, I have really taken to the Groups and discussions, even though I am trying to give Quora a fair shake. What’s the difference? In my case, ease of use. LinkedIn is just easier to follow the Groups, topics and discusssions I want to follow. It’s easier to make a connection when I want to connect privately with someone about something under discussion. I trust the moderation, and even with Quora’s voting system, I still find the jumble of questions and answers harder to sort through.
And let me be bluntly clear about the interface: it does the job adequately and quite directly. As my fellow UX friends will say, that’s smart and that’s good, because as Google has clearly taught us, fancy graphics and an intrusive interface that slows down GETTING IN AND GETTING OUT will not improve the user experience. And what does the average business user want?
They want something that’s tested and works. They want it easy to use and relatively painless. They want it to be unobtrusive. They want privacy a la carte. And they want something that’s proven to be profitable as a business, to insure that it will last—this already happened, as opposed to some of the other (major) social media entities.
Visually, the unprettified LinkedIn may be low on pictures, but it puts connectivity right up front and center, with personal/professional background info and group interactivity just a layer or two below. Not glamorous, but it does the job. And, unlike Facebook, there are no great controversies over privacy issues and the ownership of content.
So, Thursday, I’m watching the New York Stock Exchange to see how it goes…and I might have to disclose that I own shares in LinkedIn by Friday, if the path to legitimacy for social media roars open.
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