The Wall Street Journal is working internally on a WSJ Connect, a “LinkedIn Killer” to compete with the biggest name in business-focused social networking. The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corporation. News Corporation also owns MySpace, which it purchased for approx. $580 million. MySpace has been overwhelmed by Facebook in the social networking battle of consumer attention and time spent online. While Facebook has seen meteoric increases in registrations and time spent online, MySpace has faltered and dropped out of the spotlight.
So News Corporation has a lot of social networking baggage already. Add to that the dark clouds hanging over printed newspapers and their lack of online revenue streams, and you have the stage set for an incredibly bad decision coming out of some committee at News Corporation.
Will WSJ Connect dominate? No. LinkedIn already has a huge head start in the world of business social networking. Consumers go where their friends and connections are, and that place is LinkedIn. Convincing the people already using LinkedIn to switch to WSJ Connect would be too much work and potentially impossible. Convincing non-users to use WSJ Connect instead of LinkedIn will also be difficult since those people will want to go where they can tap into a widespread existing network.
Further, connecting the site to The Wall Street Journal is misguided. While the newspaper is certainly a respected brand and news source, business users will not be swayed to connect their own social network with a newspaper brand. Trying to jumpstart a business social networking site by leveraging The Wall Street Journal brand will be unsuccessful and a poor brand extension for a newspaper that is better served by finding other online revenue streams than becoming the distant runner-up in the business social networking space.
Overall, if your goal is to be “the next” or “the (dominant brand) killer”–as in “the next Google” or the “LinkedIn killer”–then you need to rethink your strategy and your goals. Chasing another brand and trying to win their customers will require tremendous effort and money, and the dominant brand will always remain at least one step ahead on the innovation front.
Your strategy should be to leapfrog the status quo or the dominant brand, or develop a “blue ocean strategy” and create a totally new and unique market for your brand.
Thomas Edison didn’t set out to build a better candle.
