NET - Linkedin & openBC: no competition!

I feel like it was important to talk about two excellent online networks, Linkedin and openBC.
My goal is to explain the key benefits, differences and differentiators, and show you that it is worth to register on both websites which kind of complement each other!

Linkedin's key benefits
* Purely business networking
* Quality of its members
* Simple interface, which appeals to senior executives
* Endorsements

openBC's key benefits
* Between social and business networking (Pictures and html friendly)
* Communication features (messages, forums, events)
* Extra value for its subscribers: offline meetings + PremiumWorld
* Strong in Europe (mainly in Germany and Austria)
* Multilingual
 
Key differences (Linkedin / openBC)
* Business model: Subscribers (InMail, Job Board) + Ads / Subscribers + "Private label"
* Advertising: yes (google ads) / no (add free)
* Communication features: no -limited- (there is an Inbox though) / yes (messages, forums, groups, events)
* Membership: different kinds of packages / one -more limited-
* Premium advantages: depends on the package (more InMail, more info on contacts out of reach) / create groups, events, use power search, benefit from PremiumWorld, discount for offline meetings
* Language: english only / multilingual
 
Statistics from Linked Intelligence by Scott Allen
A couple of weeks ago, Scott created Linked Intelligence. It is a great blog dedicated to Linkedin.
In his post titled LinkedIn Daily 2006-09-06, Scott gives interesting figures which "compare" Linkedin to openbc.

Worldwide comScore numbers for July 2006
(LINKEDIN.COM/OPENBC.COM)
* Total Unique Visitors: 1,346,000 / 1,439,000
* Average Daily Visitors: 75,000 / 142,000
* Total Minutes: 20 million / 47 million
* Total Pages Viewed: 44 million / 90 million
* Average Minutes per Visitor: 15.0 / 32.9
* Average Pages per Visitor: 33 / 63
(Figures obtained directly from comScore Europe – figures are world-wide.)

I agree with Scott's comments: you can't compare openbc to Linkedin. openbc is a platform which help people communicate and interact: members can send/receive messages, post a message on the forums, create an event send invitation and send reminders... It generates a lot of activity and it explains the significant differences in favour of openbc.

Now, I am going to quote Scott, Linkedin is all about "getting more done with less effort"...
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Technorati: businessnetworking, socialnetworking, linkedin, openbc, xing

Comments

[Konstantin Guericke]

I think your blog entry is going to be helpful to many people in terms of learning more aobut the differences. I found it confusing though that you said OpenBC is strong in Europe. We have 2.9 million members in Europe--I believe OpenBC has far fewer (I think their worldwide membership is around 1.7 million) and it's not well distributed across Europe, but mostly in Germany/Austria. Wouldn't you agree with that assessment?

[Jan]

Very interesting blog with a good comparison; I disagree with the statement that having multiple languages present on the platform will be a key differentiation for XING/openBC but actually think that it will foster the existence of multiple smaller platforms within XING; probably not that many folks who can read Chinese or Cyrillic symbols.
See also my post on http://janmeise.blogspot.com/2006/12/linkedin-versus-xingopenbc.html on the same topic