Are Social Networks Ready for Change?

Big questions will be asked this year: Can America wait for change? Will the economy bring down the country's iconic brands? And will Facebook ever make real money?

2009 has been flagged by tens of millions of people as a year of change and this new, uniquely fluid currency must irrigate through our industry as we prepare to market to an ever-evolving and elusive audience.

Be relevant, small quick: U.S. advertisers will spend close to $1.3 billion this year on social networks, according to eMarketer. That money isn't solely going to Facebook and MySpace. It's being spent on the new bespoke social-networking tools like HiveLive, Awareness and Communispace. These new 2.0 organizations are fracturing the homogenous "one-size-fits-all" social community and helping create micro social-network homes for groups, workforces and hobbyists that are infinitely more relevant to their users than the giants of social networking.

These products are also fast; users can go from social zero to community hero in hours. And the more relevant the social currency or content, the more users will visit and "stick."

Sites like gurgle.com, a parenting site launched last year, have already made significant inroads in building sustainable online communities -- and actually monetizing as brands look for more ROI and less wastage in their online marketing budgets. Big isn't always best. You only have to look at the activity by Moet & Chandon/LVMH and Mercedes on niche social networks delivering a smaller but more significant audience than the blanket bomb approach on the big boys.

Share your audience: BeeJive and countless other social aggregators are rapidly staking out territory on the new applications business on iTunes. Enabling consumers to log in to multiple chat and social sites at once, they enable the user to communicate using a multitude of options.

If you want to comment on Gawker.com now, you can log in with your Facebook ID. With Google also in the game with an OpenID product, social networks need to either accept that they may also become a commodity -- or learn to share users.

Either way, for the big ones it means a harder fight for revenue. The sites that will grow are the sites with specific audiences that engage consumers with messages and content relevant to them, and enable them to share, across social network platforms, their information.

Curated content rules: Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, makes a good case against Web 2.0, arguing that the rise of consumer-generated content is destroying culture. It's certainly a concern when a so-called professor on Wikipedia turns out to be a 24-year-old writing from home. But the point here is desperately simple and yet incredibly important: Stupid will listen to smart, but smart will not listen to stupid. There comes a point when your wall on Facebook has too many widgets, hugs, pigs being thrown and not enough relevance for friends or even advertisers.

2009 must see a rise in quality content. From online magazines to curated social content -- and by that I do mean bringing back editors -- the words we read have to work harder than ever to earn the dollar, so let's make them the very best we have.

Social shopping: Finally, will 2009 be the year that the ever-elusive social-shopping phenomenon finally takes off? Or did it already? The availability of "wish lists" from Facebook applications like Style Feeder -- and Amazon's dominance of lists -- should start to evolve into collective shopping.

The model might not be what's been generally predicted, the basic member-get-member model of leverage through scale. It might become more like an online Costco, e.g., membership-based social communities that, through subscription and recommendation, will save. Given the current economic climate, this really could be a way to lift online transactions -- and advertiser traffic.

Political social nets: Much has been said about the power of social networks to engage voters. We all know the power of the Obama online campaign and what it helped deliver. It may not, however, have delivered revenue (in terms of donations), but it did deliver loyalty and the illusion of two-way communication. 2009 should see more time given to social networks (both bespoke and the big guys) by policy makers, politicians and parties.

But the caveat here is that you keep your audience engaged. 2009 will see push back from spurned communities that may have signed up to support a cause or candidate and then feel distinctly dropped.

Finally, I'd suggest that the most likely thing to happen would be the most unlikely thing. During times of pressure, economic, creative or otherwise, brilliant ideas seem to occur. Who knows what the next social product will be? But ultimately, can this industry evolve and change as quickly as our consumer?

Yes, we can.

-By Sabine Heller
Sabine Heller is editor-in-chief of asmallmagazine.
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