Jacob George

Once upon a time there was grasshopper and an ant.

Grasshopper poked around on Facebook all day long, while the ant built links on LinkedIn, one link at a time.

Then came the recession. The party was over, and both lost their jobs. Grasshopper looked at the people he poked in the past on Facebook and found several interesting people to share a beer with, but no one he could contact to get some job connections.

On the other hand, ant opened up his LinkedIn account, joined the “Resting Communicators” group and informed all his professional contacts that he is available for employment.

I think you already understood the moral of the story.

LinkedIn is a professional network of over 35 million professionals across 170 professions in over 200 countries with average household income of US 109,000.00.

That was in September. The average income has crashed since. So have many careers.

To borrow a phrase from Prison Break “The hunted shall become the hunters”. I am of course not talking about criminals. With an over-heated job market, LinkedIn was used till recently more by recruiters, hunting for employees.

That is changed now. The hunted have now become the hunters.

As the job situation worsens, people will renew friendships and add new ones in LinkedIn. As people lose jobs, they will add their current colleagues to LinkedIn, expanding their networks.

I saw an article around the middle of last year that LinkedIn is for losers. That is all changed now. Networking is the most productive way of finding professional jobs.

In my rather simplistic illustration above, I painted a rather bleak picture of Facebook users. That was just to bring out the contrast of course. Facebook will be slowly emerge as a job finding network as well, though professional are not likely to use this channel to find jobs. But Facebook might emerge as a good channel to recruit entry level and casual jobs.

LinkedIn will sharpen their business model to monetize the new popularity. They have already started an advertising network with other web sites, similar to Google ad network. They offer custom-made display ad solutions to large advertisers and text ads for small advertisers.

“LinkedIn Answers” will hit the mean stream soon. This is one of the most powerful ways to get feedback on ideas and to conduct research among your industry peers

A few of weeks back, LinkedIn tied up with Lotus Notes to provide corporate employee networking solutions. We can expect to see them doing more corporate solutions with their technology, as more and more corporations look for more out-of-the box solutions, instead of custom build by their IT departments.

Targeted professional sites like Sermo (networking for physicians) Adgabber (Advertising) will grow, and many more will emerge soon.  Other professional networking sites like Xing, Yorz, Ecademy,Ryze, Spoke and Plaxo will have to sink or swim this year.

Unless something totally unexpected happens, I think 2009 clearly belongs to LinkedIn and the ant.

Beyond that?  Your guess is as good as mine.