Thanks for commenting.

Ian, addressing your comment that “companies like Microsoft, SAP and Oracle protect their revenue streams because they have an obligation to their shareholders to do so”, I agree that this is their obligation. But just like a football team with a lead in the 4th quarter playing it safe, they leave themselves vulnerable to the opponent that has nothing left to lose. I can think of three other companies that tried to take care of their shareholders by playing it safe … GM, Ford, and Chrysler.

Addressing your comment that social network profile data is not kept current, I can tell you that I keep my LinkedIn profile more current than I ever kept my resume. That’s because I consider LinkedIn to be my most important professional social network, I know that my profile is always visible and I never know who might be looking at it. I agree though that I have other profiles that I have not been as diligent in keeping up-to-date.

On a similar note, I’ll concede James’ comment that Facebook may not best tool for professional networking, e.g. as compared to LinkedIn. Still, you never know who you might meet where and some of the best opportunities might come out of totally different industries, so even Facebook has some value.

On to the second point, just because you participate in a social network does not mean you keep your profile information accurate and current. Many people that I know only update their profile when it is self-serving to meet their personal needs. In addition, many people participate in multiple social networks and eventually discover that they maintain only one or two. The other two, three or four, etc that they initially used become neglected - even more so than the one or two that they actively use - and the information ages, just like on any other list. Unless the owners of the social networks and utilities make the recency of updates to profile information available to users of that information, user profile information will became less useful, just like many lists do in the open list rental market when they age and are not updated.

Great post - this is right in line with some recent posts of mine about leveraging the web to expand a company’s reach and lower costs of business. (The Global Market of Electronic Design and Save Budget Using Xuropa)

As you can imagine, we’ve taken a long hard look at FaceBook and do actually use it to a small degree for marketing. But my conclusion is that it’s not a fit for our industry. Or even most industries for that matter.

It’s founding and its heart and soul are consumer facing. The interactions are personal, the style is informal and many of the tools are frivolous.

When engaging an online strategy, brand is paramount. An association with FaceBook would definitely have an impact on a company’s brand.

And a clarification - Xuropa is open when it comes to CRM integration and have clients that use Salesforce.com. We’re also open to LinkedIn as well and have tools that leverage that network. We’re not interested in re-inventing the wheel, just integrating and adding value for our industry.