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All Acquisitions Should Make This Much Sense
September 23, 2010 | Neal | No commentLinkedIn Boosts Social Features With ChoiceVendor Deal: Tech News «
You don’t have to spend too much time figuring out why the acquisition of ChoiceVendor makes so much sense for LinkedIn. To the outside eye, the leading professional social network has seemed extremely stagnant in the face of what can only be described as a glorious opportunity to provide numerous premium functions to corporate users (enterprise email, intranet, sales force automation, etc.). The acquisition of ChoiceVendor at least gives LinkedIn users something productive to do with the service when they aren’t actively networking in search of jobs, sales intelligence, advice, etc. My big complaint with LinkedIn is that while it is incredibly useful in the limited use cases I mentioned above, it is almost useless other than for vanity purposes outside of those use cases. Blog aggregation is a little bit interesting but I can do that in a bunch of ways. I get much richer and more frequent status updates from people via Twitter and Facebook. The book recommendation section with strong Amazon integration is nice but how frequently would anyone who has a fulltime job and a life outside of that really use that feature (i.e., it is a nice tertiary application but not a killer app by any stretch). I don’t know if ChoiceVendor will be a frequent enough activity that it will qualify as a killer app that would get me to use LinkedIn regularly vs. occasionally but it certainly seems like a strong marriage of community and functionality. I could certainly see synergy with LinkedIn Groups – e.g., create a meaningful group of Call Center VPs around ChoiceVendor content around call center vendors.
As someone in professional services, I am extremely curious how this one plays out and how services firms can use ChoiceVendor’s new-found audience to market themselves and manage their reputations.
Tags: Acquisitions, Digital, LinkedIn, Service Marketing
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