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Driving force behind website transforming face of business
HALF of the global population of white collar professionals will be members of LinkedIn within five years, according to the business networking website's marketing chief.
Yorkshireman Patrick Crane, who grew up in Huddersfield, said the Californian website had the potential to transform the way people do business across the world.
LinkedIn's membership reached 27 million worldwide on Tuesday and has 1.5 million members in the UK and 6.5 million in Europe.
The biggest membership areas are media and technology professionals, although the American company said one of the fastest growing sectors is financial services.
Mr Crane, the 35-year-old vice president of marketing, said: "We looked at the total number of white collar professionals in the world and it was something like 300 million. Five years from now – while this technology is incredibly hard to predict – more than 50 per cent of the world's professional workers will be on this system. Every LinkedIn profile will become the online manifestation of you."
Most business relations can take place within the LinkedIn "ecosystem" and the website will become a "necessary tool" for doing business, he said.
The company boasts that a new professional joins LinkedIn every two seconds and claims 361 per cent year-on-year growth in usage. It makes money from premium subscriptions, advertising and corporate solutions. The average member is 41 and more than 50 per cent are company decision-makers. High-profile members include Barack Obama and Bill Gates.
Asked if LinkedIn had the potential to reduce human interaction, which could be damaging as business people tend to do business with other people, Mr Crane said: "The way LinkedIn should be used is to create the face-to-face encounters. The whole system is based on the idea of six degrees (of separation). The idea is that LinkedIn does not take away the face-to-face; it speeds up the way to find the right person to do the face-to-face with. Members are asking when we are going to do LinkedIn events. There's a huge desire to find contacts, make relationships and then do the face-to-face."
Mr Crane, a University of Huddersfield graduate, was speaking to the Yorkshire Post yesterday during a visit to his home country with his partner and their newborn Californian son.
Following his business studies degree, he joined Vodafone and after two years was offered a position in Sydney. He became involved with the telecommunication giant's internet operations and later transferred to Vodafone US. He then went to work for Yahoo and spent four years in marketing, search and mobile media and network divisions. The chief executive of LinkedIn, founded in 2003, then approached Mr Crane – through the website naturally – and offered him a job.
Asked why he left Yahoo, he said: "For me I realised late on in my career I'm best suited to small places. I like to build and create. That's what I do at LinkedIn."
The Web 2.0 movement was in progress however and he was drawn to LinkedIn, which he described as an "incredible example" of the internet's social revolution.
Mr Crane said he learned some valuable lessons growing up in Yorkshire. "My style is to be quite direct and that's not always the way on the West Coast. That's a quality of Yorkshire people."
Patrick Crane is a co-founder of the Laura Crane Trust, which he helped to set up following the death of his sister from cancer in 1996. The charity funds research into cancers affecting teenagers and young people.
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Wednesday 23 May 2012
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