Social for Business > Social for Consumer

Everyone keeps asking me how I ended up at Hearsay Social, so I thought I would just write one blog post to explain it.

After 8 years at Google Enterprise where I battled Balmer and crew everyday I was pretty exhausted. I knew that I needed to do something different at Google or maybe just take a break.

One day, I had lunch with my friend Scott Petry. Scott is a friend from Google, founder of Positini, Liberterian and general all around good guy.  Scott left Google to found another startup. Check them out at Authentic8. I asked Scott one key question,  “Should I slow down, take a longer break or jump into one of the several things that people were pulling me into?” His answer was simple. Take a break, until you find something that you are passionate about. When you find it get jump back into overdrive.

And I found it quicker than I thought…its Social for Business!

Let me explain my thinking.

I am an enterprise guy, not a consumer guy. I became convinced Social for Business would have a greater impact than Social for Consumer. Don’t Laugh! Just keep reading.

It doesn’t take a genius to know Social is a big thing. Social is battling mobile for the fastest growing technology in the history of mankind. It’s faster than business computing, faster than personal computing, faster than the Internet itself. Facebook has a 1B users and a market cap of $64B. Linkedin has 200M users and a market cap of $17B. Twitter has 200M users and a valuation of around $10B. Newcomer Google + even has 135M users.

The social revolution like the mobile revolution has been overwhelmingly driven by consumer and individual use.  It has revolutionized how individuals build and maintain relationships. Its power lies not is helping us build relationships with those closest to us. Its power lies in helping us create and maintain the so-called “weak tie” relationships. It keeps me stay in touch with my high school and university friends. It helps me maintain relationships with the guys that I coached with in Little League and it allows me to share pictures and experiences with my extended family who live 3000 miles away. I have about 100 personal friends and about 20 business friends on Facebook.

But here is the revelation for me; I have over 1000 LinkedIn connections where the weak tie relationships are much broader. I  use LinkedIn exclusively for business and Facebook for personal and a little bit of business. On LinkedIn, I am connected to my past bosses, my past coworkers, my past customers, my past partners, not to mention my current connections. I realized that the 1000 connections are still a subset of the business people that I should be connected to from my 28 years in business. I realized that if I was really being the professional networker that I should be, that my network should easily be double my current size and growing.

Not only is my professional social network bigger than my personal social network, I realized the value of my professional network was much larger. As a person who builds businesses by hiring great people and by getting customers, the value of all my weak- tie relationships was not a “nice to have”; it was a “must have”. My professional weak ties were essential to my professional passion and the very things that put the dollars in the bank that feed my family.

So for me, it’s not close. Social network for Business is > Social for Personal. I know that there are a lot of people out there that are similar to me.

And yet, we have only scratched the surface on leveraging social networks for business. Business is advertising on social networks to find new customers and LinkedIn has built a pretty good recruiting solution on their platform. Jive, Yammer and Salesforce’s chatter have built tools so employees at large companies can be social together. But we have done precious little to build technologies that leverage Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google + to do what social networks were designed to do. We need to use those networks to build and maintain Business Relationships! In business weak tie relationship are 95% of all your relationships. We need to leverage those weak ties relationships to build our businesses. If you’re an executive building a business or anyone in a customer-facing role, then building relationships with social isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.

And that’s why I am not taking a break. I am convinced that Social for Business > Social for Consumer. I know it hard to believe, but its true.

Then I met Clara Shih and Steve Garrity through Kristin Shevis. Their company, Hearsay Social was founded with the realization that Social for Business would be huge.  Clara even wrote a best seller about it, The FaceBook Era. They realized that Social for Business would not be a new network, but would have to piggyback on the existing networks. They built some great technology to leverage Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ and landed about 50 customers who shared their vision. They are not just little customers, but big Fortune 500 customers.

We are just getting started. It’s going to be big! It’s going to be fun! It’s going to help businesses a lot!

You will hear more about how I plan to help us bring Social to Business and especially to customer facing people. Stay Tuned to this blog.

I guess I will rest and kick back later. I promise.