Outsourcing relationships

Michael Wolff of ki work sent me a quick round up of 'news from the front' surrounding LinkedIn's recent valuation.  He says;

• Linkedin raises another $53m valuing the company at around $1 billion.
• About 23 million people in 150 countries have set up profiles on Linkedin so far, with another 1.2 million members signing up each month (growth rate 5.2% per month compared to facebook 12.5% per month)
• Ning currently valued at $500 million.
• On recent series C funding for oDesk of $15m, I suspect this would be on a valuation of $100m +

So, pretty hot area for investors.

It occurred to me a long time ago that companies are outsourcing their relationships to LinkedIn.  One area where this is having a profound impact is in recruitment, where the relationships recruiters form with prospective candidates are managed outside company boundaries and on other platforms.  Small, smart recruiters like Fred do all their candidate generation on Facebook, Twitter (the 140 charcater CV) and LinkedIn.

Large corporations who have not woken up to the demands of Generation Y, and the innate need for people to form groups and communities of practice, are missing an opportunity to create organisations as productive as the open source community.  Years ago there was an active community of Air India pilots on CommunityZero because the company just couldn't (and probably still doesn't) provide an online environment for its people to exchange professional experiences.  Large programmes of change taking place in big companies to this day do not even consider building collaborative, social architectures of participation on which they can execute change. 

Thnk about this for a moment.  LinkedIN and a number of other business networks could conduct an analysis on their data to derive a social graph of a large percentage of people from a single organisation.  The graph would show the frequency and strength of inter-relationships and identitfy Influencers and connectors, in real time. 

Maybe this unintentional transparency is a good thing? Maybe knowing what these inter-relationships are is worth much more than $1 billion?