LinkedIn vs. Facebook

I’ve been thinking a lot about the serious competitive pressure LinkedIn faces from Facebook (which has the potential to swallow all things social). The fear is that LinkedIn is just a subset of Facebook and will easily be overtaken if Facebook decides to launch and promote its own professional network. So what do you to if you’re Dan Nye? I think the answer is simple. You infect every social network with your professional social apps. Build the apps to mimic the main LinkedIn site, and offer them for free on Facebook and every social network supporting OpenSocial. This is the approach that Ilike is taking, and I think it’s brilliant.

For instance, you can browse Ilike artist pages from MySpace and Facebook. That means they can pitch themselves to artists as the one stop shop for updating and disseminating band information. That’s an incredibly powerful proposition! LinkedIn can win by doing this for professional networking. Their current Facebook app is a step in the right direction, but it’s half-hearted in comparison to the functionality on the main LinkedIn site. LinkedIn needs to fully commit to this new paradigm of building apps that work inside the popular social networks. They must understand that this is actually a way for them to infect and neutralize their biggest competitors before these Goliaths have a chance to mount an effective attack in LinkedIn’s market space.