The Global Human Capital Journal

2009 Poised as Inflection Point in Enterprise Usage—LinkedIn Increases Relevance to B2B Executives

During the 1990s, I was intimately involved with helping global organizations to decentralize their information technology—as a management consultant and marketing executive. However, a far more disruptive force is imminent today: communications and marketing are rapidly evolving into a networked, distributed pattern, following IT's lead. Individuals that congregate online will have an increasing role in affecting how other people make decisions, significantly weakening the influence of the mass media on which many marketing strategies depend. Organizations that depend on centralized, controlled communications will be astonished at how fast they become irrelevant over the next five years. Although the case studies are still being written, I'll go on record as saying that the 2008 U.S. presidential election will prove to be an inflection point of digital social networks' disruptive potential.

LinkedIn is a leading venue for B2B and B2C executives, so it merits significant attention. The inputs for this Executive Adoption Snapshot are varied: I have had the opportunity to work with hundreds of executives to apply LinkedIn to their business processes in 2008. I met two LinkedIn executives this month, and I covered CEO Dan Nye's recent interview. I will synthesize clients' experiences and LinkedIn executives' remarks in three sections: 1) Executive Summary, 2) remarks from Dan Nye, Patrick Crane and Steve Patrizi, and 3) Analysis and Conclusions.

I would also be remiss if I did not share some of my experience around what kind of services enterprises will require to excel in this new environment, so after Analysis and Conclusions, I have provided initial thoughts gleaned from my experiences with clients thus far working with Web 2.0.