EXPERT NETWORKS: Where is the industry going?
Gerson Lehrman is the big dog, but vertical communities, vertical search
engines and alternative information platforms like Monitor110 are moving
reputation-based information discovery online. And now the ad-based Google Knol.
Just where is this industry going? Who are the up-and-rising players, which
models will prevail, and is it possible for anyone to knock Gerson Lehrman off
of their formidable perch? I’d really like to know what you think.
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This is part of the experiment I mentioned in a post a few days ago. I have asked this question on LinkedIn, Facebook and now here, on my blog. I think this is a really important topic that warrants spirited, vibrant discussion, but I’m not sure which venue will serve to generate the most and best content. I guess we’ll see. I’ll report back.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Adrian Heilbut
EMAIL: adrian@nonstationary.com
URL: http://www.alluviallabs.com
DATE: 12/18/2007 04:13:26 PM
I think we’re going continue to see more diversity of available experts and tools for reaching them, and at the same time, more segmentation in the market based on how much people are willing to pay. There will certainly continue to be a market for exchanging big bucks for information that borders on proprietary, but that there’s lots of room for growth from below.
I’ll propose five companies in this space that I think fit at different places along this market continuum:
I feel like there’s something funny about the design/culture/norms of linkedin that still fails to encourage openness of discussion in the same way that blogs and facebook do. They seem to be trying to
fix this with their openlink program, even though I’m not certain what that does (besides than signal a willingness to take questions). Linkedin doesn’t have a way of doing answers for money, and perhaps
for that reason most of the questions are pretty low-value or general. I wonder what would happen if they provided a way to bid for answers to questions and have those offers show up in front of the right people,
without one having to explicity make an offer to a specific stranger.
- KnowledgeBid (www.knowledgebid.com)
This is a startup doing essentially what looks like an on-line and more open version of Gerson Lehrman for hourly consulting in a wide range of very specific areas. They provide a payment system and and database of request listings and subject experts. Notably, they’re also paying for referals, which seems like a smart idea.
- Techdirt (www.techdirt.com)
Techdirt has an interesting, and perhaps unique model. They’ve assembled a set of experts, and do quick-and-dirty custom consulting analysis by farming out cases to their panel of self-nominated experts, and then synthesizing and summarizing the results into a report. Techdirt does seems to me to be more about getting general strategic insight (or perhaps more about web and software businesses) than on really deep vertical expertise in areas like health or enineering.
In the healthcare vertical, we’ve got:
Sermo (www.sermo.com)
- Sermo is essentially a social network for physicians. There are two advantages that sermo has:
1) it lets the buyers obtain implicit expert opinions by monitoring discussions, without necessarily having to ask an overt question.
2) it provides access to a broad sample of experts. I presume, but have no real idea, that the cost-per-doctor on sermo is
much less than it would be to talk to the same people through GLG, though perhaps the conversation is not as one-on-one.
One question that arises from looking at Sermo is whether there are any other industries that could still use this sort of network (and in which the resulting data has such potential value)?
- Boutique consulting firms (eg. Leerink Swann / Medacorp)
This is up at the high end, and more like traditional consulting. Depending on how much of the value is in the data-gathering vs. the analysis that a firm like this does, I wonder if they could ever be threatened
in the same way that GLG might be by online networks.
Stepping back, I think these systems can be categorized by four factors:
1. Demand-driven vs. implicit
2. Sample diversity of experts
3. Cost (and ability for experts to make money)
4. Depth of Analysis
How might Knol fit in? I’m not sure it does. It doesn’t facilitate asking questions, doesn’t directly increase one’s ability to access diverse experts simultaneously, doesn’t facilitate consulting-for-money, and is unlikely to provide a locus for actual analysis, if it sticks to the wikipedia neutral-point-of-view model.
About the only thing it does do is provide a place for someone to establish expertise and authority, which they can already do today with a regular webpage or blog, and it does do is focus a single page around a subject and person simutaneously. With a blog, there is often some tension between whether the blog is more about the person or about the subject.
It would be interesting to have more ways to exchange expertise that are not based on cash. Friends and colleagues obviously are the first source of expert advice in many cases. People are generally pretty eager to offer advice; often, the less a question feels like commerce, the more willing someone is to offer their opinions. Could there be models other than straight payment for an answer that would encourage and expand the pool of accessible experts? Perhaps experts could agree to share their answers for access to others’ answers with a pooling, exchange, or point-based system?
Here’s a final thought - would there be value in having an aggregator/inverse search engine for questions? Does/did such a thing exist? If people are seeking expertise across all of these different platforms, what about something that searches all of them and pushes questions out to the most appropriate expert through his or her platform of choice? Sort of like indeed.com for questions…
Adrian
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: John
EMAIL: rjdemarco@gmail.com
URL:
DATE: 12/19/2007 11:06:58 AM
The real growth for Gerson Lehrman and other networks is in corporate clients versus just the financial community. Where GLG has an edge is in the qualification of their consultants and the compliance they’ve created to ensure that their council members (experts) can in fact engage in consulting. These are the two of the primary reasons that would prevent someone from paying to speak with an expert, especially as the mix of available experts in Gersonís network shifts from people employed at public companies, to people who are independent. Itís easy decipher whether or not you want to speak with someone if they come from a large company or have a title that is obvious. Many large companies have policies regarding outside consulting and now prevent their employees from working through such firms. Anyone who has consulted through GLG on more than a few occasions knows that after a while they ask you to get approval from your company indicating that itís okay to continue working through them. There are a lot of potential pit falls when it comes to paid transfer of information. Companies that aspire to be like Gerson Lehrman will need to ensure that they can qualify their available experts (through a rating system) and institute a set of compliance procedures to insulate both parties from inherent risk of these interactions.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Rob
EMAIL: rob@businesspundit.com
URL: http://www.businesspundit.com
DATE: 12/19/2007 09:53:20 PM
I participate quite a bit in Techdirt’s community, answering questions about mobile, web, and wireless technologies, and I really like their model. The risk is on the expert, who may submit an answer and not get chosen, but the questions are simple enough and the service is priced right so that if you already know the industry well, you can answer the question in less than a half hour and make several hundred dollars.
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2 years ago
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