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Thursday, August 5, 2010

Differentiating LinkedIn and Facebook

At  the Social Media Engagement Forum at the Mount Vernon-Lee Chamber of Commerce last month, I got a new distinction differentiating Facebook and LinkedIn.

I have been learning about social media for business use and operate a syndication model  using LinkedIn, Ning, and LinkedIn Groups.

I devote time to understanding Facebook, and have a potential use for it coming in the fall. One of the best Facebook tutorials I have attended came from Peter Corbett.

The best post about our evolving social instrumentation came from John Battelle reviewing Paul Adams slide deck. (Read the slides, too!)

The “Aha!” from the MV-L CofC was that people in Business to Consumer (B2C) operations, retail, real estate, Fort Belvoir, were doing well with Facebook, and people with Business to Business (B2B) operations were using LinkedIn.

New distinction – At that meeting, B2C was using Facebook, B2B was using LinkedIn.

What useful distinctions are you using for social media?

The next meeting of the Mount Vernon- Lee Chamber of Commerce Internet Engagement Forum is August 10th, 7:30 am. http://engagementforum.eventbrite.com/.

3 comments:

Thoughthebrowser said...

Here's an explanation of why Google doesn't get social http://gigaom.com/2010/08/04/slide-vic-gundotra-the-un-social-reality-of-google/, and the difference between facebook, twitter quora, and foursquare http://ifindkarma.posterous.com/pandas-and-lobsters-why-google-cannot-build-s
Oh, and the wonderfulness of the B-52s.

Two cool posts.

Unknown said...

I really think the "B to B/B to C" distinction is an important one. Thanks for the enlightenment. I hope everyone reads the syndication model link...it's a good one! Thanks Dick.

Unknown said...

Good information!

One of those obvious things that come out of nowhere for a flash-bang enlightenment is how users are learning about social media applications.

Each ap, within its scope, is feature rich and users discover the features that are helpful as they use and experiment with the application for their tasks. Others, using ap but with a different focus discover new things as well.

When ap users get together and talk about their experiences, folks find that expereinces differ and learning comes quickly from sharing experiences. I was at a meeting about social media and a social user of Facebook (sharing pictures and current activities and general correspondence with friends and others) responded to a question about setting access to a Business-to-Business user who wanted to be selective in what her clients and competition could see. The social user said "no problem, you can set access to a finer point just the way you want" and offered to show the other person just how to do it.

Learning through conversations and sharing is not new, obviously, but these two groups don't usually share user discoveries. So the line between business and social is blurred further as effectiveness with the aps increases. Not how-to books, manuals or training - we've broken into true peer to peer learning.