Social Networking 2.0: Focus on Professional segmentation

After Facebook and other popular social networks, the career niche will be the new direction for second-generation social networks Richard Savo Richard Savoie, a ski enthusiast. In December 2008, however, he found himself fed up with ski-lift and online forums. When riding a cable car, he needs to put the skis aside and untie the ski boots. In this way, the skis will be completely hung on the front foot, resulting in tired feet. Suva hopes to develop a magnetic connectivity system that connects skis and ski boots, but his existing rare-earth magnets do not produce enough magnetic field strength. Suva began looking for help from the Internet, but he found that the General Engineering Forum had become a place for students to ask answers to homework. This connecting system is not the only bizarre project Suva. "I often do champagne projects with a beer budget," he says. "To that end, he built a group called" Engineers looking for something "on LinkedIn, a professional social network, with the aim of" helping people find ideas, tips or resources to complete a project or prototype. " At present, the group has more than 2000 members, and Suva is also the answer to solve the problem of magnetic field strength. Subdivision of social networks is not intended to challenge the social networking hegemony of Facebook. The value of these small groups is mainly to bring together professionals, share professional views and explore specific interests. On this platform, professionals can study technical problems through brainstorming, share expertise, understand industry trends, find partners, get career advice, and even find jobs. Another reason for these sites is that people want to make a complete distinction between family relations and professional interests. "We are not very willing to use the term ' social networking '," said John Dai, director of student activity and organization management at the IEEE (American Institute of Electrical and Electronic engineering) Johnday. We tend to use the term ' knowledge network '. "Because of their professionalism, the number of such social networks is small, and each social network is geared towards different technical groups." The recently launched Power Panel community is aimed at engineers who design, develop and maintain oil, gas and other industrial facilities. In the 3 weeks after the launch, the site attracted more than 150 users. Another website Element14 aimed at design engineers. On LinkedIn, some groups also target specific niche areas, such as medical devices or graphical user interfaces. There are also open source sites such as Arduino (design and development platform) and CodePlex (Microsoft's free Open-source Project hosting website) where engineers can share projects. The ResearchGate and Labroots sites offer scientists and engineers a place to share research. Labroots is similar to the traditional social networking platform, while providing data mining software, rootAccording to the user's personal information to provide them with relevant content. Greg Cruikshand, the company's CEO, Gregg Crouchanco the site in 2008, when he wanted to combine social networks, career networks and online forums. "Facebook is a great social interaction, and LinkedIn is an advertising portal for the workplace, and the discussion board lacks user personal information and data discovery technology," he says. Labroots offers real-time message rollups, video releases, research papers and reviews, and even Facebook-featured "wall" messages. Of the 400,000 registered users of the site, 76,000 were engineers. Obviously, a site like "engineer looking for something" meets the needs of many engineers. "I've received a lot of thank-you notes from people who have found work partners through the group," says Suva. I'm not sure if it will bring the Fortune 500 companies in the future, but it's hard to predict if there's enough time and membership. ”