An Inefficiency of Professional Social Networking

Recently I have talked to many entrepreneurs who have experienced the same issue I have with starting a new company; having a couple great ideas, but lacking the right people to make them happen. For a startup to be successful it ideally needs a few different types of people. For example, an internet startup would ideally have the entrepreneur/business person, a tech superstar, and a creative designer. The problem is that professionals, especially young entrepreneurs, seem to have a personal network that is very vertical. For example, an entrepreneur will know a lot of other entrepreneurs, but not a lot of programmers or designers.

This is an issue that almost every entrepreneur deals with. Listen to this sound bite of Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com. Finding the programmer that built the first version of Digg, was a lucky find on eLance. For every Kevin Rose story, there are probably 20 others that end in failure, or more importantly, don’t even have the chance to get off the ground.

A lot of people would say that this is the purpose of professional networking sites such as LinkedIn or Xing. But in my opinion they actually discourage the action of “cross vertical networking” by charging for introductions and contacting people. Even if you do pay for introductions, a good majority of the people on the network don’t even want to be bothered. In the end, LinkedIn has become more of a contact management tool for me then anything else.

The question I have is can an online networking site be built that successfully facilitates cross vertical networking? The problems I see are:

1. Quality of the Network

How do you keep the quality of members high enough? There are a lot of people out there who may want to start a business, or join a startup but just don’t have the qualifications. Not to mention it only takes one spammer to ruin the network.

2. Trust

Trust is a big issue among entrepreneurs with new ideas. Could the network overcome this?

3. Critical Mass

Simply put, there need to be enough people in the network, to make it useful.

4. Focus

Focus can make network more valuable at first, but locks out a lot of scope that could potentially be useful in the future.

[tags]Social Networking, Social Network, Social Media, Professional Networking, LinkedIn, Online community, Entrepreneurship, Brian Balfour[/tags]

Side Note: I need to give credit to conversations with Mark Doerschlag of MarksGuide.com, Trent Bigelow of Luova Ventures, and Scott Hurff of Groupvine, for inspiring this post.