AppGap On Facebook

AppGap has put up the recording for the webcast on Facebook for Business ... Quite an interesting one, this ... the summary is available here. They are making some very important points. One thing which they point out is that facebook has a way of getting group information propagating seamlessly, and information tends to find its way to other groups quite easily on facebook.

If, on the other hand, you look at linkedin, you would not find something like this happening. In fact, the groups over at linkedin are not nearly as dynamic as what you could find over at facebook (unless i am missing those which are ...). From this, or from other research, they arrive at the conclusion that facebook users are more social than linkedin users. First of all, i dont think this distinction can be made. You find more or less the same set of guys around. To my mind, this is more to do with positioning ... linkedin have positioned themselves around work ... its a very serious network! On the other hand, facebook is fun ... which is probably why folks believe that facebook is for "kids", while nobody has this opinion about linkedin.

In other words, the social network is heavily reliant on its positioning. Which is true of most of the tools you would come across in the web 2.0 stable ... they are, after all, all about people participation, and people will participate in a way in which they perceive the tool. Hence, this perception needs to be created and managed, more so in the organizational context. A well-hidden social network is totally irrelevant. So if you are looking at introducing social networking at the office, it might be a good idea to run advertisements for this.