CASE's hard-working staff members should be resting up this week after pulling off a successful annual CASE Leadership Summit in San Francisco (except now they have to run the Summer Institutes). The conference ran fairly smoothly; here are a couple of comments about content.
In the opening session, At the Nexus of Innovation, Technology and Learning – What Are the Lessons from Silicon Valley?, Stanford University president John Hennessy moderated effectively. He was engaging and light in his approach to the discussion with Allen Blue (Vice President for Product Strategy and co-founder of LinkedIn), and author Tim O'Reilly (founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media). O'Reilly is credited with coining the term "web 2.0" (which he pronounces "web two-dot-oh").
O'Reilly began by commenting that
under Web 2.0, the network itself becomes the platform. The way things work is shifting to the network.
This is critical for understanding that it doesn't matter if Facebook or LinkedIn is the network of choice, or whether you prefer those sites' "status updates" or Twitter's "what are you doing right now?" What matters is that the function itself (e.g., telling people what matters to you, what is important to you at work or play) will transcend specific sites or services.
To O'Reilly, the secret of success in social media is to
think of yourself as a community member, and then act as an amplifier of relevant information in the community. Twitter is the most minimal newspaper and I'm the Editor-in-Chief. I'm pointing to other people and their information streams.
In an ironic moment, Allen Blue said that if collaboration tools such as Twitter can "break down the way information is sequestered in silos, you'll have a more innovative enterprise."
This sounds good, but it's completely unconvincing – at least, coming from LinkedIn. The business networking site is notoriously stingy with information about its members' activity, with no analytics or aggregate reporting of any kind available to organizations (like alumni groups) that use the site's Groups function. If LinkedIn is committed to helping universities and schools become "more innovative enterprises," they'll start letting the information flow out of the silo they've built, in the way that Blue describes.
Of course, it runs counter to LinkedIn's business interest to let information leave the silo – their only real asset is data about members' relationships and interaction (a point made indirectly later in the conference by Brian Uzzi, who spoke about The New Science of Networks). This tension between enabling innovative use of data, versus constraining data flow in order to pump up its value, is at the heart of commercial social networks' business models. In LinkedIn's case, Group owners such as alumni associations are caught in the middle.
I raised this exact issue the next day with LinkedIn's Adam Nash (Sr. Director of Product and User Experience), who was a panelist alongside folks from Yahoo! and Intel (moderated very well by Stanford's Ian Hsu). I asked him if LinkedIn could provide a dashboard that provides data about our Group members' aggregate profile and their use of the site for networking.
Nash told me that a lot of information about schools' alumni populations on LinkedIn is available from the recently-enhanced advanced search functionality on the site. I intend to test that out, but my point was that I shouldn't have to go digging manually for basic information about my school's alumni – I want automated reports that push useful data out to me. I'm even willing to pay for the service. LinkedIn doesn't seem interested (partly for the reasons described above).
If I did get that data, I'd be much more effective at marketing LinkedIn to my institution's alumni, which is after all what LinkedIn wants, isn't it? LinkedIn gets more members, my school's Group grows, and alumni get plugged in to a meaningful subset of their own network. Everybody wins.
I'll comb my notes from this session and others to see if there are any other conference tidbits that caught my attention. If so, I'll post them as well.
