Author, podcaster, and internet marketing veteran Guy Kawasaki is watching people flee Twitter and wondering why everyone isn’t simply moving all of their Twitter interactions to LinkedIn.
“Why is everybody going to Mastodon? What am I missing? So you’re going to go to a place that has none of the people you know?” Kawasaki wonders.
Kawasaki understands that LinkedIn might have good reason to stick with its tradition of not defining itself as a true social network. “But you know, if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck and it walks like a duck, it’s a duck,” he says. “I don’t care what your PR firm tells you.”
While talking to Fast Company for our recent oral history of LinkedIn, pegged to the 20th anniversary of the company’s founding, Kawasaki—an Apple veteran, serial tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author of 15 books—explained how he’d rebrand LinkedIn as the new Twitter.
Fast Company: LinkedIn predates Twitter and Facebook and it’s still thriving in a way that those companies aren’t. As a longtime LinkedIn power user, how do you think that happened?
Guy Kawasaki: I like to say that LinkedIn was standing by the side of the river and a Peking duck flew in its mouth. All it has to do is chew. Because you have 800 million people, most of whom are who they say they are. Of course, there’s bots and fake [profiles]. But not like on anyplace else. And that means that most people tend to be more well-behaved. If they say, you know, “I work for Boeing.” Well, if you work for Boeing, you probably are not going to espouse pro-Nazi, QAnon, white nationalist theories. So, it has that natural, unique selling proposition that makes it a great social media platform.
I mean, maybe they figured out that they don’t want to be a social network. Maybe there’s no economic model. Maybe it’ll be too much trouble to quash the porn and conspiracy theories and all that. But if someday they woke up and decided to be a social network, with very little change, if any, I think they could dominate.
