In 1997, a friend of mine invested in a firm called “Where’s Frankie?” The concept was a directory or network of University Alumni. They talked to several Ivy League schools that were interested in licensing this technology and community but were not interested enough to make it a real business. They closed after a few hard fought years. Fast forward 10 years and Facebook is the market darling. Their charming CEO nerd, Mark Zuckerberg, is a Harvard drop out who approached Harvard about this concept and they declined citing privacy issues, conflict with yearbooks and probably 100 other issues, not realizing the big opportunity. Thank God they did. That enabled Mark and his team to change the world and launch what I would call the next big Web innovation in social networking. If you have the time, please look at this keynote of Mark Zuckerberg as he speaks to 800 developers at the San Francisco Design Center about Facebook’s platform, why they built it, and the applications it enables people to build.

Facebook Developers

More about Facebook … and its impact on HR …

Started in Feb 2004, as a university/campus networking tool, it reached over one million active users in less than one year. The next year they accepted $12 million+ in funding from Accel Partners (the same partner, Jim Bryer, who sat on the BrassRing Board) and grew their college network to 800 campuses and 5.5 million users. In 2006, they received $25 million from Greylock and Meritech Capital and opened the door to non-campus users. Usage skyrockets. Today, they have 24 million active users (an active user returns to the site monthly, with 50% returning daily and surfing 50 pages per day or 1,500 pages per month). Unheard off. This amounts to 40 billion page views a month from their 24 million members. They are currently the 6th most trafficked site on the Internet. Look at some of the staggering facts:

- 100,000 new users per day

- 3% growth per day …. Total growth of 300% per year expecting to take year end numbers to 50 million users, with 50% RETURNING each and every day.

- People over the age of 25 are the fastest-growing demographic and they expect this to make up 75% of their traffic in the next six months. Today it represents 60%.

Okay, if you are not blown away already, how about the fact that they turned down $1 billion from Yahoo and just recently, $2.3 billion from google!


And then to top it off, look at this video and their concept of the social networking platform, and how they are opening up the platform for users to create apps to add onto this platform.

So how does this impact you in HR? Several ways:


1) Look for a very targeted audience for job seekers. They have formed a strategic relationship with Jobster.

2) Look at this model to find ex-staff members, and people interested in similar areas as you. For example, Workbrain has an alumni site with over 100 members.

3) Build employee networks.

What makes these ideas so popular is that people come to a website for two reasons:

1) To look for relevant contextual information.

2) To showcase their expertise. This enables people to showcase their families, their friends and themselves.

At HR.com we are two weeks away from our social networking platform. Although we will never be a Facebook, we feel we have a very good opportunity to triple our traffic in the next six months building out our HR Network. We are a bit shy on the $75 million in funding to build out all the bells and whistles of a Facebook, but we do have many new features that we are very proud of. These include:

1) Members will have their own personal area to showcase their expertise. Upload all types of content business cases, case studies, pictures, ppts and contracts and enable their friends, all HR people and their groups to access the content based on roles and permissions.

2) Members will be able to search for other members who have similar needs and opportunities and add them to their network.

3) News Wikis with over 1,000 definitions of HR terms as well as 250 metrics and definitions and updated free forms. Coming soon, contracts and RFP’s.

So please take a few minutes, update your profile, upload your network and more importantly, showcase your expertise. They say it takes a village to raise a child. Well HR.com is our baby and you are all part of my village. I look forward to your assistance in building out this network.

This will launch in beta and we really are not sure exactly how adoption will go, so we are counting on your feedback for tweaking and future growth. Please be vocal and share your experience. After all, the strength of our HR.com is based on the value of our community.

Please drop me a note and let me know what you think … or better yet if you are at SHRM, drop by our booth and and share your opinion.