Today's chatter focuses heavily on the evolution of niche markets within social communities. This reality of social community evolution is evident by the daily creation of more tightly focused communities catering to increasingly diverse mix of demographic strata.
The network and large content producers determine less and less what information is important. You and I determine more and more each day what is relevant, what is news worthy and what is important to us.
You are the network and everyone in your sphere of influence can and will be impacted by what and who you are online.
Today I can login into to anyone of my social network accounts, search and locate friends, business associates, jobs, mentors and facts. I can find anything I wish and almost instantly become connected to a new resource or people of significance to my personal and professional life with little time or effort.
What have social networks done thus far? Shared 77,000 new ridiculous videos with millions of viewers daily? Poked countless millions of college students around the world? Created a euphoric "Star" mentality among our youth culture today? Yes it has but it has also broken down barriers, opened communications paths, increased the breadth and depth of personal online social dynamics, hopefully in a positive way. And increased what I’d like to redefine as “Social Equity” for millions of users (more on that in future posts).
Pretty much every social community member who is active online knows more people today than three years ago because of Friendster, LinkedIn, OpenBC, Myspace, YouTube and Facebook.
Increasingly people of similar backgrounds are gravitating to exclusive, invite only, professionally focused social networks developed by brands, organizations or associations catering to them.
So why would an organization care to develop a social network of their own? How is it meaningful monetarily?
In my daily business development and creative campaign management activities I have heard and scene many intriguing ideas surrounding social community development. The creative fervor at times resembles the late 90’s. Ideas abound, investment dollars are flowing and would be netprenuers are driving their dreams to market.
As an example of why an organization would create a social network we can review a hypothetical situation… Let’s say you are a global marketing firm. You have a large stable of brands/clients who all have products and services to sell. You have an idea; wouldn’t it be cool to offer our clients a secure place where they could spit ball ideas about cross promotion and joint ventures and perhaps meet other brands/teams looking to do the same around the world? Further, we could ask questions of them, take surveys and drive our new business ideas through this new platform while nurturing their creative plans and projects. The residual effect could be; new PR/Marketing projects for us, new business relationships, larger media buys, acquisitions, new product development, new marketing strategy development, stronger brand awareness through all active client companies, better feedback from publics internal and external, quicker reaction times to critical needs of client base, proactive solution development to evolving issues (nip it in the bud).
By launching an internal social community the marketing firm now has a managed platform to launch new ideas, introduce various account teams that may be dispersed over a very wide geography and create synergistic projects and relationships throughout client base and employee base.
The ideas for niche social communities abound, another great example is http://www.carcrazycentral.com/. This website was developed for two basic premises support and extend Maguiar’s brand (car wax company) and concentrate wrench head activity online in an open shared forum that can grow and develop freely through member contributions. Early on many individuals stated grey haired car guys would never migrate off their existing forums and onto a MySpace like social network. Boy were they wrong. CarCrazyCentral.com has grown exponentially as one of the favorite stops for car lovers and car owners a like. And it’s been a staple brand driver for Maquiar’s car Wax and showcases some of the featured events the car crazy community crave.
Within 2007 thousands of social communities will come online. And in an every increasing fashion much like the explosive growth of web sites in the early 90’s everything from knitting circles to professional offline networking organizations like the one I founded, Local Business Pros (www.mylbp.com) via Ning (http://yourlbp.ning.com) will find their way to social community platforms that offer free service and asset management in exchange for ad displays. While larger entities will opt to purchase an enterprise license or hosted license arrangements like those provided by Omnifuse (http://www.Omnifuse.com) and their FUSION 3.0 platform.
The final question for all organizations seeking to develop a social community strategy is simply: how do we monetize this new technology and is it meaningful to our publics (internal, external); more on that later as well.
Best Regards,
Kenneth Knapp
Founder Social Fiend
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