IT Execs Get Antisocial Social NetworkIT Execs Get Antisocial Social Network

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Meet the professional social network that never wants to get anywhere near as big as LinkedIn. Launching this week as a public beta, Wisegate offers an online professional network where chief information officers, information security officers, and other IT leaders can ask questions and get answers in a peer network, free from vendor influence.

Access is invitation only, although you can now request an invite, and exclusive. One key rule: no vendors allowed. "We're the antisocial social network," CEO Sara Gates said cheerfully, in an interview.

That "no vendors" rule extends to CIOs and internal IT executives at a company like Cisco. Regardless of their title, if they may also have some marketing or promotional interest in membership, they're not allowed in the door.

"Our mantra is no vendor influence," Gates said. That's one of the things members value the most and a reason they are willing to pay a subscription fee for Wisegate, when other professional social networks like LinkedIn are free. Memberships are $1,000 per year for those who sign up during the beta period, which runs through December. Gates just laughed when I asked what the fee will be after the beta ends, but the implication was it may go higher.

"A lot of our members say, 'It's like the reason I go to my favorite conference every year. I don't go to talk to the vendors or the analysts, I go to talk to my peers.' Well, our price is essentially equivalent to what it costs to go to one conference," Gates said. When members ask a question, or create a poll for other members to answer, they know they are getting unbiased information, whereas if they tried to ask the same question on LinkedIn, the majority of the responses they would get would come from vendors, she said.

"What I really like about Wisegate is that it's invitation only," said Deborah Wheeler, global chief information security officer of Ally Financial Services. "I didn't want to be part of another forum where vendors are going to get a hold of my contact information, and I'm going to be on everyone's email lists, everyone's phone lists. I don't have time to respond to that, I don't have the budget, and I don't have the interest."

Wheeler's interest also reflects skepticism about the credibility of IT analysts and the influence vendors have over them. "I find my involvement in Wisegate provides a tremendous return on investment, much more so than our membership in Gartner. If I compare spending money on participation in a group with my peers, versus spending significantly more on analyst theories and analyst paid money to endorse products to begin with, I'm going to err on the side of Wisegate very time," she said.

Ally does use Gartner services, but Wheeler doesn't have a subscription for her department because she doesn't find enough value in its reports. She said she wasn't speaking for her company, which does subscribe to Gartner services, but for herself. When she wants to reality check a security threat, and the money and effort her organization should take to counter it, Wheeler said she gets much more timely and trustworthy information from her peers. "Security professionals will talk very bluntly with each other," she said.

Gates said most Wisegate members "definitely still use the Gartners of the world, but this is a very different way of getting information."

Wisegate is like a social network in some ways, "although the antisocial part means we're here for a very specific purpose," Gates said. Unlike a public social network that sends you notifications as links pointing back to the website, so the site can rack up more ad impressions, Wisegate will just send you the content of the notification. Connections between individuals are on a "follow" model, rather than a reciprocal "friend" connection, and members can also follow topics and product categories. The site is building up a library of in-depth product reviews, with particular attention paid to any gaps between marketing hype and reality.

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There are other social community websites targeted at IT, such as Spiceworks, but Wisegate is more narrowly focused on senior IT management roles. Gates said Wisegate plans to expand to cover other professional communities, with IT as just a starting point.

As for the biggest professional social network, Gates said she would rather integrate with LinkedIn than compete with it. "We don't ever want to have millions of members, so we can sell ads," she said. Wisegate is just now integrating LinkedIn authentication and plans to also allow members to import from and connect with their LinkedIn profiles, she said.

Another important aspect of the service is that it's not only on the Web. Wisegate also organizes conference calls on topics of interest to its members and assigns staff to moderate and follow up with a transcript that identifies key takeaways. "It's human to human--how novel---but it's really funny how popular that is," Gates said.

For example, Wisegate organized one of these conference calls at Wheeler's request to discuss hiring mistakes and how to avoid them.

"We talked about finding the right technical skills and background, coupled with business skills and savvy, which seems to be very difficult, and how to rectify mistakes and improve the process going forward," Wheeler said. Online questions and polls are useful, but sometimes it's useful to hear the tone of someone's voice when they make a statement so you understand if they're angry, or passionate, or maybe just joking, she said. The results of these conversations are also archived, so they can be referenced by other members in the future.

Kristen Knight, privacy director at Philips Electronics North America, said she recently attended a valuable Wisegate conference call on data loss prevention. "The thing is, I didn't have to drive into Boston and sit in a seminar and get probably only limited information," she said. She is also a member of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, which is a good source for information, but when she attends one of its in-person conferences she is often too rushed to ask an organized list of questions, she said. Compared with a conference, Wisegate "is way more cost effective, and I don't have to worry about travel," she said.

Knight said she trusts the online conversations on Wisegate "because I know these people have been vetted, and I know I can be confident that they became a member because of their position, and they're not a vendor. They're not going to give me skewed information because they have no reason to."

As anti-social as it is, should Wisegate even be called a social network?

"I think over time, it will become more of a social network," Knight said. "Right now, I'm still trying to navigate through it figure out how to use it."

"To me, it feels like something else," Wheeler said. "It's not a LinkedIn, it's not a Facebook--thank God--but it's something very much needed in my industry, a sharing forum that feels secure."

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