Q&A: Kevin Eyres on LinkedIn's tipping point

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That’s really where you’re going to have paid subscriptions today.

Do you see your rivals like Facebook charging for premium services, or does that only work on a professional network?

The people who are subscribing are the ones who really have to reach outside of their network in order to get their job done, so they get commercial value, very specific commercial value, out of that.

Social networks are by definition social, so they’re the place where you share those sorts of [funny] pictures, connect with classmates, figure out where you’re going to go on the weekend. There’s less of a commercial aspect to it, so I think that they would have a difficult time in order to do that.

That’s one of the things that distinguishes professional networks and social networks away from each other.

Many people have referred to the past few years as the first version or edition of social networking. What do you think is going to happen in the next era, social networking 2.0?

This is really where people are starting to understand how – especially from a professional standpoint – taking the power of information and knowledge sharing to a very different level [means you can] start to have more collaboration.

So say I’ve got a challenge at work or I’ve got an opportunity that’s in front of me. I don’t have all the information that I need to make a decision, so the first thing I’m going to do is go to LinkedIn in order to get that knowledge and very quickly make an informed decision because I’ve interacted with people I know and trust.

I think what you’ll see professional networking is much more of a a business critical tool, where it’s being used on a day-to-day basis in order for knowledge and information sharing.

It’s like when email first came out. People were using it sometimes, but it wasn’t that critical business tool. And then it became where a predominate number of people were connected on email and you could communicate very quickly. That was kind of tipping point for that application.

What we’ll see in professional networking is you’ll have this tipping point where vast numbers of professionals are actively using the tool so they can solve problems very quickly.

How far off do you think that is?

In some cases we’re there, in many cases we’re not. If you look at some IT professionals, people in Silicon Valley, people who work with ideas as an entrepreneur, then that happens very quickly and very easily on LinkedIn.

I’ve got this great idea for a company, I’ve got to look for a couple of developers, a couple of marketing people, not to employ, but to bounce this idea of off them. Entrepreneurs are using it in that kind of way right now.

It’s more the general professionals. I think that is going to take more people getting on there. Everything has a bit of a life cycle where you have the early adopters and you start to become mainstream, so I think that we’re starting to see where this is becoming more and more mainstream.

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