Hot Commodity

I’ve written previously about TalkBizNow’s aggressive entry into the business networking arena on August 18th. With claims that the website will be far superior to LinkedIn and hopes to attain over three million users in the first six months, the company loves to generate buzz, regardless of how or why.

I just read a recent interview that BNET conducted with TalkBizNow CEO Martin Warner dating back about a week to Friday September 12^th. Below are some snippets from the interview:

BNET: Who predicted that the company would be five times bigger than Facebook? What’s the basis for the claim?

Martin Warner: Who said that? [What we said was] that the business networking market is going to be five times than the social networking market. It has nothing to do with Facebook. Is that the headline? I’ve not said it.

BNET: Didn’t you vet the release?

MW: I approve or my president approves every press release, but this comes as a complete surprise to us. It’s not good form if someone from our agency released this without being approved.

BNET: The release also claims that Talkbiznow.com is the “world’s first business networking site.” How is that true?

MW: That’s a fair comment. If we think about a couple of the players that are trying to do this in the market, Xing out of Germany and LinkedIn out of California, they’re allowing business professionals to connect with each other, and on that we all agree. The difference is the way we can do peer to peer networking, hosting a webinar, or selling a product. Once you connect, they don’t necessarily say here’s what you do to do business online. Ours may appear to a social network to be a little stout. It may look like a business application – it is a business application. It is a pure b-to-b networking tool. We haven’t seen that on the market. It’s whether you have something that wants to be a b-to-b tool or something that sits in the middle of a business and social network.

BNET: No offense, but the type of over reaching statements in the press release I saw indicated sloppy execution. Might that not come back to bite you?

MW: If you read all the press on us, I think we’ve done very, very well. People have testified how good our press has been. We’ve got enormous amount of buzz around the application. The press campaign, I’m very happy with. We’ve got that coverage and, I’m sure, we’ve got viral targeting based on it. We can put out something that raises more questions and then be ready with answers. That can be effective. We just have to stand up and be counted for our statements.

Alright, so where to begin? First of all, it’s a bit questionable that neither Warner nor his president approved the comment about TalkBizNow being five times greater than Facebook, and yet it somehow made its way into the press release, but I won’t even harp on that point for now. The claim that TalkBizNow is the first business networking website is simply riddled with holes. Judging by the responses to the interview posted on BNET, even if you buy Warner’s argument about LinkedIn and Xing, which I don’t, several other business networking sites that offer similar peer to peer networks have existed for the past couple years. Take a look at WeCanDo.BIZ, Biznik, or Zoodango, just to name a few. It’s one thing to say you’ll be the best, it’s another to claim you’re the first when others clearly already exist.

Because the number of social networks has exploded in the past few years, experts have been studying the mechanisms and ins and outs of this phenomenon. One of the most important aspects of any network’s success seems to be the trust and the relationship between the users and the network. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, is well known as the face behind Facebook, and users are encouraged to contact him if ever they have something to say about the way Facebook works. With the amount of exposure one receives by including so much personal information on the network, it’s no surprise that trust is such an important element.

Dan McComb, the cofounder of Biznik writes, “It seems that anyone who has been in the business networking industry for any length of time knows one thing: successful business networking is all about building trust. In fact, any business getting started in this social media landscape is going to need the trust of their customers, and making overly bold claims isn’t exactly the best way to get it. The fact is [that] “business networking” is a massive potential market, with plenty of room for healthy competition. Adding some project management tools to the application sounds like an interesting idea. I question whether advertising on a social network of any kind will be able to support the model, though…”

I commend the company for adding such software services as blogging, webinar facilities, calendars, free user advertisements, and online stores to the more expected linking with colleagues and business associates; however, I can’t say the same about their marketing strategy.

Enough of my rambling though… let’s see how the website is doing so you can judge for yourself…

(It’s been exactly one month and remember: the goal is to attain three million users within the first six months)

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 6:07 pm and is filed under Management Musings, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.