Starting Scrubadoo

Well, today I’m going to tackle LinkedIn and Twitter, two somewhat newer social/professional networking applications that we hope will prove useful to our start-up.

LinkedIn

I learned about LinkedIn while working at JWT, an ad agency in New York City, before business school.  LinkedIn is similar to Facebook in that it builds an online network of people you know and allows you to connect to new people through this network.  The big difference is that Facebook was designed as a social networking site, and LinkedIn was designed as a professional networking site.  So instead of friends, you have business contacts, and the content exchanged throughout the network is work experience and qualifications, job opportunities, company information, etc.  We have decided to use LinkedIn as another way to get out the word on our company ScrubSquared, and its two businesses Scrubadoo.com and Scrubraisers.  LinkedIn now hosts company pages, which describe a company, provide a link to its website, and creates a common identity that its employees can link to from their personal pages.  I imagine this will be most useful to us in letting our acquaintances and professional networks know what we’re up to, hopefully leading to suggestions, advice, and contacts that will be helpful to us.

Twitter

Twitter of course is the latest social networking craze.  I just read an interesting article about it last night in TIME Magazine.  For now, Brett and I are both tweeting as ScrubadooBrett and ScrubadooMer.  We’re using this in a similar way to LinkedIn and Facebook in terms of getting the word out on what we’re doing from an entrepreneurship standpoint, but I believe Twitter has the potential in the future to create an ongoing dialogue about what nurses and other medical professionals go through in their day-to-day lives, which could give us some insight into how to make their lives easier.  I think Twitter’s still really finding its own identity, and we’ll have to figure out our Twitter identity as time goes along.