To everyone who thinks Facebook is just for posting status updates of what you ate for breakfast and pictures showing your drunk ass from last night, BranchOut aims to change that mentality.
The brainchild of social media pioneer Rick Marini (who previously founded SuperFan and Tickle, profiled in an interview here), BranchOut leverages the potential of 500 million Facebook user accounts by offering a one-stop career center.
The way it works right now for career networking on Facebook is every account has an optional “Info” section where you can share work information with your friends. But there is no way to view companies that employ multiple mutual friends; the company and school links on your Info page are redirected to community pages and you are listed as someone who likes that company, not that you work there.
With BranchOut, you can instantly see the names and pictures of your friends, the work and school information they manually inputted into their Info sections, and additionally there is the option to import LinkedIn data — which BranchOut synchronizes with the Facebook Info data — and you can edit every section to make it look professional. You can also, like LinkedIn, endorse people in your network and write recommendations about them.
The 6-month-old Facebook application is gaining storm and third-party opinions by Jolie O’Dell and Lou Adler are positive. I only needed to click around for a few minutes to grasp the business potential of using the combined Facebook and BranchOut to generate job leads and promote career development. I don’t know how many recruiters are using this tool nor if it would take away prospective LinkedIn users, but this is something to consider for your networking arsenal.
About Ari Herzog
Hey Ari,
Branch Out is great. I’ve just checked it now after watching the video you posted.
Fantastic tool indeed.
Funny story Ari – just a couple of day’s before I actually got on their network, my partner and I were talking about building an application into Facebook that integrated both services, either as a separate stand-alone app like Branchout or just integrating the functionality with Facebook and the actual Linkedin site.
They had beat us to it!
We were amazed that such a simple idea had not been done by anyone yet – haha
To top it off, without realizing it, I had spoken to Kai Fortney over there back in November about PR (hadn’t discussed anything, just agreed to talk first of the year) – and now we are talking about how we might help them with that.
I love the app. Integrating FB and Linkedin I believe is a home run. Adoption will be huge and it seems to be going viral at the moment as I have 15 to 20 people joining my network daily.
Cheers Ari!
I wonder how many Beanchout users have LinkedIn accounts… that are outdated.
My guess is quite a few… many members haven’t even uploaded their Linkedin profiles. I have about 260 connections and about half don’t have them linked. As well, I have about 30 requests for recommendations from folks that I don’t know that well (my bad, when I started FB, I connected with friends, but also met many new ones : ). I won’t give a recommendation if we haven’t built some kind of relationship over at least a year or two… figure by then if you’re an idiot, I would have figured that out by now and/or if you’re providing value and insight to the community. It makes me wonder if folks are just giving out blind recommendations to get numbers – that really doesn’t help anyone in my opinion.
In any case Ari – nice chatting with you – make it a great Thursday!
Ari, I’m rarely an early adopter. I’ll watch and see what happens with Branch Out, and then I’ll decide.
I can say that LinkedIn has definitely helped me make connections with people in the college textbook publishing industry.
Interesting conversation going on on some Facebook groups right now about Branch Out.
Not a fan of the social gaming approach – “Person X has just joined your Empire” – and the spammy approach to blast wall postings isn’t cool.
Could have potential but they need to address some basic problems first.
What’s the conversation trend you’re observing?
The “spammy approach” you allude is optional, by the way. Thing is, most new users don’t see the option to manually select friends.
The majority of conversations aren’t positive – most are removing the app and blocking requests from friends to join it.
The difficulty in filtering wall posts is another bugbear – like you say, most new users don’t see the option, so that’s a UI issue that should have been more upfront when the app launched.
It’s great to see Facebook (through their developers) trying to make it easier to have your personal, professional and business uses in one area. But they need to try and make it easier for people to get the best out of something first time, every time.
Cheers!
Nice way of utilising social media
With “500 million Facebook user accounts” there should be something for everyone out there.
If the recession goes on for much longer, we could all be using it.
This seems to be an exciting way of using social networking. This may finally allow me to justify the time I spend on Facebook. I can see a great potential for employers to perform background checks on a person without having to hire expensive detective services and let people find out more info on a ‘work contacts’ company. The possibilities are endless.
Its a very interesting idea, my immediate thought was isn’t it just trying to replicate what linked-in does?
Perhaps they can leverage facebooks less formal environment as a point of difference?