A Little Help from Your Friends

Ken Toren, the founder of a portable medical records service company called REDmedic in San Jose, hired his sales director through LinkedIn, and raves about her exact fit for the job he needed to fill. "I found her three degrees away on LinkedIn. It was a trusted network -- my own -- and I got exactly what I wanted, directly, rather than going to the masses and leaving things up to chance," Toren says. Similarly, freelance marketing consultant Scott Stratten, who runs a company called "Un-Marketing" in Ontario, Canada, claims that the community feeling and ongoing conversations on the site literally draw customers to him. "I'm making more revenue from Ryze without ever having to approach a customer," he says. "They see my profile, read the views and commentaries that I've posted in previous discussions on the site, and they approach me with opportunities."

In the end, the success or failure of any of these social networking services will depend on their ability to sign people up for their service. After all, the more people who join, the larger the networks, and the greater chance that you will find your perfect connection -- to Bill Gates, to that ideal sales rep, to whomever can help advance your business and career. Right now, each service offers a little something special. Want a community atmosphere? Go to Ryze. Want to protect those contacts, but maybe rub shoulders with more senior professionals? Check out LinkedIn. Want someone else to take care of the data entry, and turn up contacts from your email files who are long gone from memory? Sign up with Spoke. Want the largest amount of data about a contact, and unfettered access to your colleague's Rolodexes? Lobby your company to get InterAction.

But you'd better choose your favorite soon. We'll probably see a shakeout in social networking before too long, as these companies and their various clones experiment with business models of varying success, or ultimately cannibalize each other's memberships and combine one another's features into a single, super-service. Until then, all's fair in love and war.