Reference no: EM133283416

Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, Facebook is the world's most prominent online social-networking company.  Headquartered in Mountain View, California, LinkedIn is the most significant online professional network de­ signed to help members find jobs, connect with other professionals, and locate business opportunities.  The two companies are becoming more and more rivals as their business model becomes more and more similar.  Both websites are free for members to join, and both earn money through advertising spots.  LinkedIn also gains revenue through its job-listing service.  Companies post job openings and search for candidates on LinkedIn, which is particularly advantageous for students nearing graduation.  Facebook wants some of this action.  Members of LinkedIn tend to be white-collar and highly educated; 45% of LinkedIn visitors earn more than $75,000 per year.  Facebook has nearly 3 billion members across the whole economic spectrum of income.

Asevidence of the two firms gravitating toward each other in products and services, LinkedIn recently rolled out its video-uploading feature,trying to become more like Facebook.  Facebook is testing new professional (rather than social) features to take market share from LinkedIn.  Both companies' primary strategy is product development.  Facebook and LinkedIn continually develop new, improved, visible and invisible business analytics models to gather and assimilate data and then sell the data.  LinkedIn has created a big-data framework dubbed Gobblin that helps the social network collect tons of data from various sources so that it can beanalyzed in its Hadoop-based data warehouses.  The company also houses a variety of internal data (information about member profiles, user actions such as comments and clicking, and so on) in databases such as Espresso and event-logging systems such as Kafka.  Also, LinkedIn takes in data from outside sources-for instance, Salesforce and Twitter.  Facebook is testing a mentorship feature to help members identify and spend time with professionals based on common interests.  Facebook is also testing a LinkedIn-like resume feature.  Many people prefer to keep their social activities (Facebook) separate from their professional activities (LinkedIn), but separation becomes cloudier as these two firms become more and more similar.

Questions

1. Should Facebook develop features to allow people to efficiently hunt for jobs on their website, including posting their professional vita?
2. Should Facebook develop features to allow businesses to hunt for employees on their website, including posting job descriptions and job vacancies?
3. Should LinkedIn develop features to allow people to post personal pictures and videos on their website?
4. Should LinkedInand Facebook merge? What are the pros and cons of a merger for the two firms?
5. Should LinkedIn and Facebook cooperate rather than merge? Identify and describe three ways the two rival firms could cooperate mutually beneficially.