Which professional networks?

As you well know (and as previously discussed), there is a fine line between making effective use of online professional networks, and spending all day connecting, tweeting, commenting and blogging.

Who has all day to do this? Unless your job title is 'Online Marketing Specialist', then you'll need to consider a new network carefully.

Is it a useful marketing tool that will help win business? Or is it a time-wasting drag, devised by a clever techie start-up obsessed with bumping up their member numbers so they can make a quick buck with advertisers while dreaming of being the next Facebook?

Here's a high level review of some of the main networks. For more in-depth detail, or for some help on which are most suitable for your industry, contact KnowledgeWorks. More to follow in a few days.


Spoke

Spoke says it has 60 million users, mainly in the US. Basic membership is free but premium is costly (from $25 to $99 monthly). Most comments posted by members are dated from 2007 or earlier, so our guess is they’re not getting very many new users, or any up to date discussions. In any case, this is more of a 'people finder' than a professional networking site.


Xing

Xing is probably the most successful online professional network in Europe, after LinkedIn. It has 8 million members worldwide, with most of these European. Xing has strong corporate backing and this, along with with reasonable membership fees, is a good first step to a solid business model. Xing's functionality is very similar to LinkedIn – a blend of networking, discussions, and also job searches. It has yet to make a big impact in Ireland and the UK, but watch this space.


Zoominfo

This is essentially a US-based list broker. It claims functionality as an online networking site, but in fact it’s about accessing lists and contact details for people and companies. Zoominfo gathers data abut people and invites users to register in order to ‘reclaim’ your data and fine tune the profile that already exists for you. Even the free trial to premium level at Zoominfo requires that users share their entire address book (from Gmail or Outlook etc). Usually these sites allow you to pick and choose which of your contacts you’d like to search for, but Zoominfo takes it all. This site might be useful if you need lists from the US, but not for professional networking.


Jigsaw

This is a good US based B2B directory with contact details only. It has powerful search functionality, with a very detailed search engine, although data is likely to be scraped from other sources rather than contributed by the individuals themselves. Jigsaw charges for obtaining contact information. Again, Jigsaw could be useful for finding people and their contact information, but it's not useful for networking. Jigsaw has recently been acquired by Salesforce.com, the contact management business, and this could raise issues about ownership of data.