What will the Wall St. Journal version of MySpace look like?
That’s the question I ask myself as I consider the potential ramifications of this deal (read story from WSJ).
The Wall St. Journal brand is very powerful. Which business person or entrepreneur that you know wouldn’t give his or her left arm to be written up in that storied periodical?
Why? Because the Wall St audience is EXTREMELY powerful…high end, successful business people who influence policy, creat opportunities and make billions of dollars worth of buying decisions.
Imagine if we were able to go beyond reading articles and join into a community with these readers. Imagine how value able “LinkedIn” would become if it had the power of WSJ behind it. That’s what I’m talking about. This could be the tipping point that causes an avalanche of b2b user generated content. It may take a while (since a typical WSJ reader might need to be retrained for the online world), but it makes sense (to me) that this is the way they’ll go. We’ll probably see B2B news channel pop up inside MySpace soon (syndicated from WSJ), but that’s low hanging fruit and not as powerful as WSJ creating a B2B community that is a sibling of myspace, not co-branded and very different in terms of functionality.
Business deals get done and problems get solved based on personal relationships. A B2B platform like the one I’m imagining could give business people more ways to connect…form relationships…and could become a catalyst for growth, change, innovation, deals…
Not sure this is what Rupert Murdoch has in mind, but that’s what I’d do if I had $5 billion to spend.
