Peter Drucker once asked as to the difference between the job and your business. This was in context of a cleaning firm who thought their business was supplying mexican migrants as cleaners. But Drucker pointed out that whilst the job was bucket&mop, the real business was training unskilled people with poor job prospects (language) to be productive. This changed the company's focus from trying to expand a saturated cleaning market to finding new outlets for their revenue growth.
Similarly in the digital, realm you have to understand the difference between what you are implementing/deploying/operating and the business. LinkedIn<http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/19/us-linkedin-influencers-idUSBREA1I0Z020140219>may prove to be an example because it found that page views dropped so decided to open up the Influencer's program (invited business personalities bloggers) to anyone. As noted > > In recent years LinkedIn has moved away from its roots as a dormant resume > library for headhunters and job-seekers, instead positioning itself as a > social hub that aggregates news, links, and status updates from members which suggests either they are measuring the wrong metric (for success) or that they are changing their business (going into ego-stroking). Resumes were once a necessity in screening individuals for roles, so LinkedIn early roots in the recruitment industry helped gain the profiles of many professionals (unlike Facebook which is more consumer oriented). However, emphasising quantity over quality (which is what SNS unfortunately end up do ... ie mean reversion) means that the relevance factor drops. Everyone has experienced this, from early bulletin boards, to newsgroups,to avatar worlds (cyber-gentrification?). If the business model is dependent on advertising revenue and not job placements, then there is a subtle trend towards the quantity rather than quality end of the spectrum which actually in the long-term will discourage the very people who contribute the (supposed) unique insight and thus attention. So what is LinkedIn's business? Is it reinforcing business "personalities" (ie ego stroking?) or is it running away from its roots as employment portfolio (reinforced by 6 degrees of interconnectedness)? Some of the initiatives like linkedIn maps reinforce the latter but trying to seek page views for the sake of page views without understanding what is the underlying business is a worrying sign that the C-level are trying the shot-gun blast approach to growth. You can see this happening previously when Yahoo-mail moved to SNS portal, whether google can effectively integrate all their acquisitions into the right pattern matching conveniences, or Myspace downsizing (acquisition value dropped by order of magnitude). Whilst it is too soon to write-down LinkedIn (now with public pressure to perform), I'd note from http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140423160409-95015-corporate-acquisitions-of-startups-why-do-they-fail<http://www.linkedin.com/redir/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Elinkedin%2Ecom%2Ftoday%2Fpost%2Farticle%2F20140423160409-95015-corporate-acquisitions-of-startups-why-do-they-fail&urlhash=_2AG> that acquiring companies for revenues is different from growth potential and should be priced accordingly. -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Silicon Beach Australia mailing list. Vist http://siliconbeachaustralia.org for more Forum rules 1) No lurkers! It is expected that you introduce yourself. 2) No jobs postings. You can use http://siliconbeachaustralia.org/jobs To post to this group, send email to silicon-beach-australia@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to silicon-beach-australia+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia?hl=en?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Silicon Beach Australia" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to silicon-beach-australia+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
