Aqua Pebble

Nov

5

What is all the Xing about?

November 5, 2009 | 1 Comment

xingI have noticed that a few peo­ple have men­tioned Xing when they talk about their favoured bas­ket of Social Media. I had never heard about Xing before, or if I had it never stood out and slapped me in the face. With so much infor­ma­tion out there it is easy to miss the less than obvi­ous. So I went in search of Xing.

The first thing I learned was that Xing is busi­ness net­work and their tagline is global net­work­ing for pro­fes­sional. Okay, that sounds sim­i­lar to LinkedIn. I needed to find out more so I reg­is­tered with Xing and it is sim­i­lar to LinkedIn: you cre­ate a pro­file, you con­nect with oth­ers, you join groups which have dis­cus­sion forums, you can look for jobs and there is a sub­scrip­tion model also avail­able. It has a nice log­i­cal user inter­face and easy to under­stand. I never noticed any cool apps I could add to my home­page — I like wid­gets and gad­gets, apps what­ever you like to call them that make my life eas­ier or smoother.

I never com­pleted my pro­file (need to go back and do that) but jumped straight over to groups. They have a nice groups direc­tory page which also shows the biggest groups. As of today it is a group called Global Busi­ness with 41,023 mem­bers. What I found inter­est­ing was the num­ber of Ger­man groups and Ger­man listed com­pa­nies (my per­cep­tion was at least 80%) — out­side of Ger­many it is mostly coun­tries from the Europe.

I then hopped onto Google to see what I could find out about Xing and most of it was their own con­tent. I per­formed a lot of dif­fer­ent searches to try find more about them. I did find they started in Ger­many (that explains it) and that they were first known as Open Busi­ness Club. I came across this inter­est­ing inter­view with Jason Gold­berg, Chief Prod­uct Offi­cer at Xing. The only dif­fer­en­tia­tor he could give between Xing and LinkedIn was ter­ri­tory. There­fore, depend­ing on where you do busi­ness or want to get busi­ness from will deter­mine whether you reg­is­ter with Xing.

I looked for some suc­cess sto­ries on Xing but could not find any­thing like I did for Twit­ter or Face­book. I also could not find any tools for mea­sure­ment of goals or man­ag­ing Xing, though I am sure you would be able to add Xing to a tool that man­ages your bas­ket of social media.

I had barely reg­is­tered when I got a direct mes­sage from a job seeker and today received an adver­tise­ment — I don’t like that type of behav­iour and hope it is not the trend on Xing.

Over­all, I was not blown away by Xing and found their groups less than excit­ing, how­ever I would not ignore Xing if I wanted to do busi­ness in the regions it is strong in and my mar­ket were on Xing.

I would love to hear from oth­ers who have expe­ri­ence with Xing and could add some use­ful infor­ma­tion or shed light on some suc­cess stories.

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1 Comment so far

  1.    Urs E. Gattiker on November 19, 2009 11:24 am      Reply

    Lee-Ann

    I think you are right, Xing is not that dif­fer­ent from LinkedIn. Both can result in one wast­ing a lot of time if one is not careful.

    http://commetrics.com/articles/how-to-fail-with-linkedin-let-me-count-the-ways/

    Mind you I have been on both Xing and LinkedIn for some time. And yes, I am still learn­ing and mak­ing efforts to use them smarter :-)

    Xing is def­i­nitely more Euro­pean than LinkedIn and because unlike the US, self-branding is not that much of an issue in Europe (i.e. in some places it is frowned upon) inter­ac­tions on Xing might also dif­fer com­pared to LinkedIn.

    Gen­er­ally I do not get spam on Xing as you describe.

    I man­age a Xing group on Social Media Monitoring:

    https://www.xing.com/net/smmetrics/

    What I have dis­cov­ered whith that groups is that all else being held con­stant, Euro­pean par­tic­i­pants need to be nudged a bit more than Amer­i­cans to con­tribute and share. Peo­ple seem more reserved and cau­tious. I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing but it gives groups a dif­fer­ent feel and a lower vol­ume of messaging.

    Lee-Ann thanks for shar­ing this it is a very inter­est­ing post and I hope my thoughts could add a bit more infor­ma­tion to your nice post.

    Regards
    Urs
    @comMetrics

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