TalkBizNow - will it fly?
Published by Martin De Saulles on Tagged Companies, InnovationI Read in the FT yesterday about this new British social networking site for the business community. Initial comments and reviews from the FT and others are mixed with a feeling that they may be a bit late to the party and that LinkedIn and Xing are going to be hard to beat. Gaining critical mass of the right types of people is key. According to the FT, the company will be targetting the top 200 “super networkers” from other sites who have more than 500 contacts and trying to entice them over. I would be interested to know how they plan to do this - unless these “super networkers” are unhappy with their current service provider or can see some substantial benefit in moving over to TalkBizNow then I cannot see this happening. Why not just offer to pay them £1000 each? That could be a good use of the marketing budget. Talking of marketing, why did they choose that name? I don’t like the abbreviation, “biz” and “TalkBizNow” sounds very cold - something abstract like “Xing” is more catchy and feels more user-friendly. Perhaps all those types of domain name have now gone.
Anyway, I wish them luck. It would be good to have a British success story in this sector.
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August 20th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
I actually had similar views until I used the site…it’s smart!! Its not social at all, its business networking and productivity tools - its about ‘doing’ business and staying on the network. I think their PR strategy is very strong, because of the attention, the journalist comments are just naive in my opinion. there seem’s to be a greater movement to real business networking and doing things with that network. Like selling or marketing…plus I cant believe they let people advertise for free! not sure of their plan, but really like it..
August 21st, 2008 at 8:52 am
I agree when you say it would be good to have a British success story within this sector.
I’m not sure that these guys have left it too late. There is a lot of speculation over the market, especially LinkedIn, but have you seen the site? My first impressions were: Wow, this looks cool, very minimal and very intuitive. What are all these services as well, you don’t get any of those on Linked in as far as I can tell.
A quick search told me that there are an awful lot of high calibre people signing up to the site. Of course it is in its early stages, but as the population grows on the site, so does the users experience.
I can’t see why anybody would want to stay with LinkedIn, After all, it’s not very intuitive, too complex, and you have to pay to access any useful information.
Take a look for yourself; don’t just take my word for it.
Talkbiznow.com
September 9th, 2008 at 9:00 am
[...] vorhanden sein zu scheint (auch wenn Talkbiznow die 200 „Super Networker“ anderer Networks abwerben möchte). Insbesondere was die Usability angeht, sollten dringende Änderungen vorgenommen werden. [...]