I got a call the other day from www.meettheboss.com a business social network. I had been recommended by the CEO of HSBC or some such nonsense and I could participate in some sort of program and get in front of the creme de la creme of decision makers yada yada I kept on asking ‘how much’ then there was yada yada ‘how much’. £9,000. I put the phone down.
I have signed up as a punter and checked the launch press release. Apparently it is a business social network aimed at the finance industry launched last summer. It looks very nice (expensive – allegedly $50million – HOW MUCH!!!).
There is no evidence that the members are finance industry people, so I guess that objective fell by the wayside fairly quickly. The USP is that there is a two-tier system with ‘C’ level executives in a different class from us punters. From the press release:
“These executives are protected and this is what is missing from any other business networks out there – they don’t have the safety and security of being in a safe environment with peers and the top 10 global financial services organisations in the world don’t have the ability to network within the C level, and we’ve created a safe platform for them to do this.”
Now I don’t see the CEO of anyone significant spending time at his computer networking with other CEOs via some social networking site. I just don’t see it. These are important busy people, if they want to network with someone they get their secretary to fix lunch.
The discussion forum got six posts/comments in the last 4 business days so it is not eactly a hive of activity.
Compared to a really useful facility like Linkedin I somehow don’t see this one making it. But we will see in due course.
Bob Browning's blog 
I like your post Bob, I am not a CEO (far from it) just an IT geek, however i think that its a useful tool for whatever tier you are in the company, as it saves times and even i know which im sure youll agree time is money.
Sure it doesnt have the same effect as linkedin but then it doesnt have any where near the same ammount of memebrs. Yes the site is cumbersome, but the idea and stucture is something i agree with.
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I was a member of Meettheboss for a while, despite their outrageous claims of membership and users, when I logged on it was mostly just Meettheboss staff online. I have a colleague who was approached for a ‘sponsorship’ deal by them, initially it was in the region of $10,000, and they even went down to $500!. I think they were desperate for any kind of revenue from this venture.
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