Exactly why did Linkedin beat Plaxo?
I distinctly remember a conversation nine or ten years ago with a high school classmate of mine named Tom who now lives out of town, we were excahnging contact details, and I asked if he used Plaxo or Linkedin and he said he used both because they were about the same and his contacts were split among the two. At that time, neither was clearly dominant in terms of users or functionality. In fact, both were pretty klunky as I recall.
How times have changed.
Last week Linkedin went public and took off like a rocket ship and I didn’t see a single mention of Plaxo in the news. These days I have over 600 contacts on Linkedin and I use it several times a week. I can’t tell you the last time I logged on to Plaxo. I am not sure I even remember my Plaxo password.
What happened?
It’s pretty obvious why Facebook beat out Myspace (and lots has been written about that so I won’t re-hash that), but the last time I was a regular user of both Plaxo and Linkedin, no one was any better than the other in terms of features and function, and as far as I know Plaxo didn’t stumble in any big way (as Myspace did). Was it just a tipping point? Was it viral? Was it the suggestions to re-connect with old friends (was Plaxo too passive while Linkedin got more proactive)? Was it the business services that Linkedin offers?
I don’t have a good answer, so I am really asking – send me your comments and feedback.
-Ric
LinkedIn positioned itself better. It offered a value prop to people — connect and network with people you already know. Plaxo, on the other hand, offered me no value prop — go in and update information so your friend can stay up to date.
I had one friend who used Plaxo. The emails they sent were beyond obnoxious — they stank of, “Wow look at this cool opportunity! We will allow you to go into your friend’s address book and change your address! How cool is that?!?”
As the current GM of Plaxo.com here’s how I see the situation:
1. When Plaxo was trying to compete with LinkedIn (in 2008/2009) it was not focused enough on the business customer’s needs as it was still trying to go after social aggregation (ala FriendFeed). Add do that the fact that LinkedIn was also ahead in terms of engaged business customers and the outcome isn’t all that surprising.
2. As of early 2010 around when I joined Plaxo, our focus shifted away from LinkedIn and back to its original purpose of keeping address books up-to-date and in sync across all your devices and email offerings. In this new positioning we see Plaxo’s new value proposition as complimentary to LinkedIn and focused on staying in touch with the people you already know (vs. the ones you want to meet).
Related references:
Plaxo CEO TechCrunch Interview (Apr 2010): http://tcrn.ch/m4801l
Relaunch of Plaxo (Mar 2011): http://bit.ly/pa-release
Plaxo Product Line: http://www.plaxo.com/products
Ric, I recall that plaxo actually stumbled a couple of times really badly in terms of the end user experience. both LI and plaxo tried a strategy of plugins for outlook to pull C drive based contacts up into the cloud but in Plaxo’s case I remember having a very bad experience where it corrupted my local PST. I also remember Plaxo getting aggressive about sending “update your information emails” — it was a horrible spammy user experience. And also cross marketing. They were much more spammy than LinkedIn ever was. As a result of the bad tech instability (I doubt I was the only one who had a bad experience with Plaxo’s plugin) and their spammy aggressive marketing culture I began to see Plaxo as less trustworthy… Lastly, I think LinkedIn was building a hub and a community, place where you wanted to develop and manage a profile, have a presence and a directory where you could go to learn more about someone and understand their background and experience. I don’t recall Plaxo ever developing that kind of strategy. Plaxo stayed my lower on the food chain and focused on trying to aggregate and sync contacts as opposed to develop a profile platform community system that people would manage and develop. Of all these things, I think Plaxo lost because they lost my trust… and with a professional profile and contacts management you don’t want to risk losing that info much less sharing it with a service provider that may abuse it. That all contributed to me completely ditching plaxo around 2001…
I abandoned my Plaxo profile several years ago for three reasons:
1. I had a duplicate professional address book on LinkedIn
2. I thought aggregating my social presence was cool, but I was ahead of my friends in this space. No one really cared.
3. I had a personal address book in GMail.
So it became a place that didn’t add incremental value to my daily routine.
LinkedIn added something unique. A professional profile, which really became an on-demand resume. It was more than an address book and soon added other features such as groups, Q&A, company profiles etc.