FINANCE/BUSINESS

New sites put the Net to work on business networking

Bob Tedeschi

The New York Times

982 words

2 November 2006

International Herald Tribune

3

16

English

© 2006 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights reserved.

• Social networking sites captivate teenagers and young adults, but they repel professionals and not just because they do not want to be seen surfing MySpace before the big staff meeting. Networking sites aimed at the working crowd, like LinkedIn, Spoke and Jigsaw, have failed to draw a fraction of the number of users that go to MySpace or Facebook, analysts said, because they are not yet easy or useful enough to improve workers' performance.

• Hoover's, a business research unit of Dun & Bradstreet, and Visible Path, a technology company in Foster City, California, hope to change that with the introduction of a free service called Hoover's Connect. It is intended to offer visitors to Hoovers.com the ability to mine their networks to find helpful connections with prospective clients or business partners.

• The site faces the typical struggle of attracting users in a cluttered marketplace, and it also faces a broadened array of services from the category leader, LinkedIn, which is led by Reid Hoffman, a former PayPal executive, and backed by investors like Sequoia Capital. But analysts said that Hoover's Connect was still well positioned to succeed. "This won't knock Google out of the headlines, but for this category it's a breakthrough service," said Chuck Richard, an analyst with Outsell, an information industry consultancy in Burlingame, California.

• The service, which is being previewed on Hoovers.com, requires little effort, but it does take a little trust. Users who visit Hoovers.com are shown the site's typical collection of information regarding businesses, including contact information, sales statistics and important executives. But those who sign up for Connect can download software from Visible Path that makes note of whom a user messages via e-mail and how frequently (it does not monitor the content of the communications). The service tracks activities within Microsoft Outlook, the dominant business e-mail system, and will eventually include Web-based e-mail systems like Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail. From there, Connect builds a meta-network of sorts to determine how one is connected to other businesspeople across the country. When a user tries to find information about, say, Microsoft, he is greeted with a box saying: "Connect to Microsoft through someone you know." Visible Path's software maps the contacts between the user and workers in various parts of the company, then determines who would be most likely to introduce the user to a given executive.

• This all supposes that enough users have fed contacts into the system to make such connections possible. Paul Pellman, an executive vice president of Hoover's, said that because the site was promoting the service prominently to its two million monthly users, establishing a strong base should not be difficult. Assuming the right contacts exist at the right company, the service sends an e-mail message to that person whose identity remains shielded from the outside user identifying the person who is seeking an introduction, and offering the option to help or decline. Only if the invitation is accepted will the intermediary's identity be disclosed to the user.

• "That's the key way business networks differ from other social networks," said Antony Brydon, Visible Path's chief executive. "These relationships are very high value, and they need to be controlled." Other business networking services allow for similar control, Richard said, but the others do not put the networking tools in a place where they are most likely to be used. LinkedIn and other online networking services, he said, are not integrated into mainstream business applications, so it requires effort and forethought to switch over to the networking sites. By contrast, he said, users of the Hoover's service are already there to look up information about a business and its employees.

• "Visible Path found a way to put their content into a tool that people use, so you don't have to leave what you're doing to use it," he said. "I use services like LinkedIn, Plaxo, Spoked, Jigsaw, but they're just adjuncts to my Rolodex." The sophistication of Visible Path's technology, Richard added, distinguished it from others in the field. Among other things, the software will track how quickly contacts reply to one another, who writes more often and the momentum of those exchanges. "People you serve on panels with might be hot contacts for a period of time," Richard said. Visible Path's technology, he said, recognizes that dynamic and is likely to suggest a hot contact when users search for prospects.

• Konstantin Guericke, a vice president at LinkedIn , was undaunted by the prospect of competing with Hoover's and Visible Path. "It's a good idea, but you have to provide incentives for people to participate," he said. "Otherwise, it's the sound of one hand clapping." Guericke said the technology might not be as useful as Hoover's and Visible Path suggested. "The most important connections happen over the phone," he said. "And you'd need to be Big Brother to analyze that."

• Technical problems could also hinder the growth of Hoover's Connect. The service was originally scheduled to begin Monday, but last-minute malfunctions forced the company to postpone its full introduction. The delay will at least not hurt the companies' sales. Neither Hoover's nor Visible Path will charge for the service, executives said, because they see it as a way to attract users to their other services, for which corporations pay thousands of dollars a month.

• LinkedIn is, in the meantime, emerging as less of a tightly focused business application than it was when it first appeared in 2001. In recent weeks the site has started allowing members to use their professional contacts to meet nonbusiness needs, like finding recommendations for plumbers and lawyers.