The Connections Blog

Very nice article by Jessica Vascellaro of the Wall Street journal...

Doctors, Salesmen, Executives Turn to New Sites to Consult, Commiserate With Peers; Weeding Out Impostors

Social networking, popularized by teens sharing information with their friends online on Web sites such as Facebook Inc., is now blooming in the business world, thanks to new social networks that enable professionals and executives in industries such as advertising and finance to rub virtual elbows with colleagues.

 

... Now, online services are trying to promote a more personal type of business networking. Unlike relatively simple message boards that are open to all, these new sites -- including Sermo.com for doctors and INmobile.org for the wireless industry -- have features such as profile pages showing professional credentials; personal blogs that function like a kind of online diary; links to "friends" online; electronic invitations to real or online events; and instant-messaging.

... For a variety of reasons, social networking has been slower to take off in the business world. Employees are wary of disclosing too much to potential competitors, and loose-lipped executives can easily embarrass themselves and their companies online. Policing these services' memberships to weed out impostors can be difficult, and the sites are still in the early stages of turning their networks into sustainable businesses. Also, business users typically have less time to devote to socializing online and are willing to do so only if they believe they are getting a unique benefit from the site.

"Professionals are fairly protective about their social networks which they spend their whole lives to build," says Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. He adds that the appeal of social networking is limited largely to industries where workers are fairly isolated from their colleagues on a day-to-day basis, like medicine, construction and sales.

Many of the new services are free to members. Revenue comes from advertising or charging outside businesses access to data and member discussions. For example, Sermo Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., generally charges $100,000 to $150,000 a year to nonmedical businesses like hedge funds, which use it to research such things as how doctors feel about new drugs. They can monitor online discussions, with the doctors' names omitted, or see a tally of topics being discussed on the site -- like a new medical device or a controversial cancer treatment -- to determine what's rising or falling in popularity.

The site, founded by Daniel Palestrant while he was a surgical resident in Boston and launched last year, discloses its business model to users when they register. Members say they don't mind that their conversations are accessible to others, particularly since their identities are concealed. In this, Sermo is different from many other sites. Doctors are generally more interested in getting treatment advice and access to other doctors' experiences than in networking for new business partners. As a result, the site doesn't require users to use their real names, although Sermo itself verifies and holds the identities of everyone who registers.

 

Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com

This is really interesting to me, as we are currently working with a very similar site to sermo.com in the UK, Doctors.Net.  They have a great population of users amongst General Practitioners (GPs) and doctors in hospitals, and again offer a great service to their u
sers free of charge.  This has allowed them to build a real community amongst their user base and enable true collaboration between doctors nationally, where previously it was very difficult to work together outside of a doctor's own hospital or surgery.

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