Social networks get networked

Here's an interesting new development from wink.com; people search: http://wink.com/people
At present it searches Bebo, LinkedIn and MySpace - but more will follow (orkut.com, anyone?)

Not only can you search for people by name, you can also search by interest, age, gender, location, status (single or not so single) screen names or whatever you choose.

So you find people who like what you like AND who like networking, on whatever network, and network with them. It's like adding the fourth dimension!

If only they'd added an optimised-for-mobile version and geo-location...

Stand back and watch that explode.

What users want from modern digital offerings

I compiled the below list of recognised current trends when thinking about the boxes that need ticking when developing a social-networking mobile internet offering. But they probably apply to all current digital planning.

Granted, my thinking is probably a bit focused on Generation-C (the under 27s this year, the under 29s, next) but then, they are the most likely group to take-up a 3G mobile offering anyway - I'd have thought. What other trends do you think ought to be considered?

Check the list and add your thoughts by posting below.

• Users want to tag their world (3G, geolocation)
• People are making use of new social networking tools to re-establish a ‘we-species’ (as in communities everywhere, but with 3G geolocation these communities can be focused on where you are right now, with the fluidity to allow you to connect with new communities as you move through your world).
• Users want to remain permanently connected to their communities (through text messaging if not ‘online all the time’.)
• People are (naturally) creative and want to co-create their content if we give them the tools.
• People want their opinions to matter – and will rate things (including content others have created).
• People are increasingly used to using several channels, increasingly at once.
• They demand speed of response.
• They have an open-minded approach to change and to experimentation (creative hacking).
• Access to mobile internet is accelerating and looks set to overtake fixed line. Design for it!
• Convergent technology is helping to drive much of the above.
• Crowd-sourcing draws on all these to create contributory communities willing to help develop products which can self-perfect. This can inform all digital development.

Mobile Social Networking - examples

If, as a result of the last couple of days of excitement around social networking on mobiles, you'd like to see a few examples, start off here: www.rabble.com or dodgeball
Or here for a list of applications
And this article from mid 2005 gives a summary of the position then.

Killer application for 3G discovered. Media firms queue here.

"Anyone in the media industries, or running an internet service - needs to know... if you are not on mobile, you won't be relevant soon... Any service, product, company, brand or entity needs a mobile phone based digital community presence."
Tomi T Ahonen

SMS has been the killer application of 2G mobile. It was only ever added as an after-thought so that you could be sent an alert when you got a voice mail. Now it's the biggest single data transfer process in the world. There are almost twice as many active users as there are of the internet. And it makes huge amounts of dosh.
So the challenge for experts in the 3G field has been finding the same surprise killer application lurking in what 3G can do/make available.
Tomi T Ahonen has been seeking it with the best brains in the field for years.
And now he thinks he's found it.

READ THE WHOLE THING HERE on Communities Dominate Brands (see recommended blogs).

It's a response to questions raised by CDB regulars (myself included) following on from Tomi's report on the staggering scale of revenues now being earned in Social Networking on mobiles.

Here's just some of the highlights:

"3G is looking for a killer application. It is hoping to discover the surprise hit, the kind of totally unpredictable upside surprise, that SMS text messaging was in the 2G world.

"Now I finally have it.

"Mobile Community Services will be the killer app for 3G. Call it Mobile Social Networks... Call it Digital Communities on 3G. Call it mobile blogging, moblogging. User generated content on mobile. But trust me, Communities Dominate.

"We now have found our first true killer application for the 3G space. And it is the digital community services.

"For the mainstream IT, telecoms and media world, interactive social networking - like blogging - is still a "black box" science, a voodoo mythical enigma, perhaps best left for the younger generations...

..."nearly 2.6 billion users with mobile phones, and close to 10% of them already using the high speed 3G phones. Anyone in the media industries, or running an internet service - needs to know this is the biggest pond, if you are not on mobile, you won't be relevant soon.

"This is the industry to be in. Any service, product, company, brand or entity needs a mobile phone based digital community presence.

"If you are not there, your competitors will be, and you will be crushed. If you are there, this is the place where finally, of internet services, you can earn money. You do not need to wait for some magical level of "eyeballs" to sell advertising.

"The mobile internet is inherently better than the traditional web, because of that very fact - every service is billable, every time your service is used, you get paid. Not to mention it's much bigger than the internet and more addictive and the clear choice of younger users.

"Understand that you can be part of the growth, when the 3.45 Billion turns to over 5 billion next year, and over 8 billion in 2008. Make your millions in it NOW!

"Do not for one moment think, that mobile will be "enough". NO. You HAVE to be multiplatform."


The need to move to social communities on mobile has been clear to me for some time (and focused for me by reading Communities Dominate Brands).

My worry is that media companies are shunting this into a bit of a ghetto, just like they did the internet in its infancy. This should be at the heart of our plans for real and rapid growth.

I believe there are HUGE growth opportunities even in what we think may be mature of declining markets - IF we understand how Generation-C intersects with them.

It's not enough to make old-style offerings on what you might regard as a Gen-C platform - and to a non Gen-C audience!

That is our most pressing challenge. Where is it placed in your strategy?

Co-Creation and the perfect group discount

C0-creation of content is a running theme in every digital plan today. But (and this is where I might finally be getting a handle on Communities Dominate Brands' use of culture instead of content as one of their 4 Cs) how will you allow your community to create its culture - and then embrace the results?

In simple terms, is your digital offering allowing communities to do what they want, rather than what you want them to do? Allowing them to 'create their own culture' by what they do with it may even reveal new ways of transacting.

Let's say your community hates 'ads' but is quite prepared to create a wish-list, or actively pull suppliers to them (by their own rss or similar). Suppliers may have to bid to provide that service to them (there are similar ideas already out there).

But this is where the culture your community co-creates comes in to play. Perhaps you don't charge either party - you allow them to contribute what they think is fair. The culture within that community will create its own pressures for users to conform. Perhaps suppliers pay to subscribe to feeds? I don't have the answer I'm afraid - I'm just keen to raise the question!

And while I was thinking about this stuff it occurred to me, the internet used to be awash with this kind of thing: Join a group buy to get a discount. But I don't come across them so much these days.

Perhaps, with the rise of 4C, systems like this will get a new lease of life.
Imagine, for example, that you could join a group to not only get a discount, but create something with shared specification you all agreed on - a car, a computer?

It's now possible on a global scale for enough people to come together through digital means and say what they actually want and have a facilitator tool up and make it.

Now, that IS co-creation.

Further reading

Am I just a figment of the community's imagination?

I've been striving to communicate better with one of the communities I'm currently working with while I prepare their website for relaunch.
It has a very active forum-based community.
One of the steps I've taken is to set up a blog where I am (I think!) honest and transparent about what we are developing, what's on time, what's not, what isn't working - and welcoming feedback.
I've also recruited around 30 users to help us test it and offer their ideas and feedback. I hope they'll not only hone it, but also become advocates for it.
We've started a photo-moblog for users. And all this 4-C style stuff has been going fairly well.
But I got an unusual response to one email I sent direct to one user. After receiving it he posted this on the forum:

"OK, the TRUTH is out there; who else has been getting unsolicited PM's & e-mails of our new on-line edditor?'cos it's got me wondering; has any-one ever actually met him?I can see lots of stuff popping up on the mag site and the new blog bit, and stuff, and I was thinking it must take a lot of activity to do all that.Do they let him out at all, or is he locked in the bowls of an Emap basement somewhere, hooked up to wires, that give him electric shocs if he doesn't upload enough bites by set deadlines?Maybe, he's actually been locked in the forum hamster wheel with a lap top?Maybe he IS the lap-top. A 'virtual' person; a figment of the 'Matrix'!I dont know.Replied to his latest and asked him, but, not sure. If he replies, could still be a ghost in the machine, couldn't he.I mean, like artificial intelligence, kinda stuff.Any one care to comment?"

There followed a bit of piss-taking etc

The thing that interests me about this is the writer's automatic assumption that he's been the target of a group email of the worst corporate kind.
It was in fact an email sent to him and just five other people who have provided us with email addresses - and was an invitation to write a news story about anything he liked and have the community judge how long it stays on the homepage/comment on it etc (a bit of a warm up for the blogs mechanism we're due to launch).

What this tells me is that he has learned to expect corporate, non-specific communications from representatives of the brand. And that may take more than a few blogs and pleasant emails to change.

Just six months ago I might have thought - 'idiot, doesn't he understand what we're trying to do?'
Now I think, I'm the idiot, I've got to work harder to make my communication with the community less corporate (even though I thought I'd taken giant leaps in that direction, they clearly haven't gone far enough). I have to work harder to break down the barrier between the brand and its community.

There has been, in the past, a real ignorance of the online community view within (particularly, but not-exclusively) print editorial teams. If people posting on our forums complain or tell us we've got something wrong, I've seen print teams close their ears and bad mouth the users as their ONLY response. If you're still in that camp - you have to change.

The other thing that became clear from the recent posts on our forums was that users have worked out that this brand is not the only one I work for - that they're getting a shared resource. I think they are ok about that (they discuss it in a relatively humourous way) but what I have learned is it's not worth trying to pretend I'm entirely dedicated to them. If you aren't honest, your community will find you out, so just play it straight.

UPDATE: My response to our user above, seems to have worked quite nicely. He has responded by email to me again - in an amusing, philosophical way. He's now actively testing our new blogs. I've tried to continue to be human rather than corporate in my communications and the thaw is discernable.

From 3Cs to 4Cs

We hear a lot about 3C websites - Content, Community and Commerce.
Communities Dominates Brands (see recommended blogs), discusses 4C solutions: Community, Commerce, Connectedness and Culture.
Oh blimey!
We can simplify this a bit for our purposes: Culture=Content.
However the emphasis on Culture suggests content emerging from the community much more than being broadcast to it.
The connectedness element is all about the way emerging communities are constantly connected through their mobiles. They are able to share, by 'word of mouth', in an extremely fast and powerful way. Flashmobbing is just one example - where large numbers of people are inspired to act swiftly and together.
Successful business models will have to combine the four and allow and celebrate their overlapping - the community creating the culture; the culture dictating our commercial practices, commercial offerings arrived at through community consent; the culture can become a commercial offering etc etc.
These four areas are converging and where they come together you have a business which delivers exactly what its community wants, in the way it wants, in the context it wants.
It won't just fit them really well, it will be the result of their own interaction and labours - it will be them.
And they will be the best marketing for it you ever dreamt of.

Or am I just talking cobblers? Tell me so below. Or have a think about the ways we could strive to create a 4C sweetspot?