Are Topical Social Networks the Next Big Thing?

by Tinu

If the growth of busi­ness blog­ging is slow­ing, and Twit­ter becomes old news, what will be be talk­ing about next in social media?

We’re already audio blog­ging a bit, and video is get­ting to be a more fea­si­ble option. I don’t know that it will get to the point where just to be seen you need to have video, not any time soon.

Not the way it is with blogging.

What I wish the next great thing would be is top­i­cal social net­works. But I doubt it.

One rea­son is that until you can port your iden­tity around on the web, or sites can rec­og­nize one stan­dard pro­file, no one is gong to want to con­stantly have to cre­ate and update a new pro­file every time they log on.

Since the early web, the main­stream user seems to want to come online, visit a few stan­dard places (email, social, news, search), and a few favorites, then go home.

Our job, if we want to push con­stant con­tent to them, is to con­vince them why we should be allowed into their cur­rent favorite online des­ti­na­tions (such as their Inbox, via emailed newslet­ter sign-ups), or why they should add our site as a new favorite.

There’s always a point of “too many”, so we’re con­stantly fight­ing for a lim­ited amount of attention.

Even if that atten­tion grows it is scat­tered among more things.

For exam­ple, there was a point at which peo­ple didn’t want to view video online, because they would have to wait for it to stream into the browser enough that they could con­sume it.

Now that it’s faster, they’ve got YouTube. And while it’s great if your video is ON YouTube, the prob­lem is that you’re com­pet­ing with all the other peo­ple on YouTube.

Even if you can get them to view video directly from you (via pod­cast for exam­ple), you’re com­pet­ing for time in the day.

If we assume they are awake for 17 hours a day, and work, eat, and are in tran­sit from one place to another for ten hours, there’s still only 7 hours left of leisure, which they’ll split among other activ­i­ties. Your tar­get con­sumer may only be on the web a cou­ple of hours a day.

If your video is ten min­utes long, what will con­vince them to watch it? If your social net­work takes ten min­utes to reg­is­ter and con­firm, what will con­vince them it’s worth joining?

Not only do we need to com­pete for atten­tion and time, when some­one decides they have time for us, we have to con­vince them over the hur­dle of cre­at­ing yet another pro­file, for yet another site.

Yes, I can log into your site with Facebook.

But Face­book won’t pull in the link to my own web­site. It can’t tell you which email address I pre­fer to get reminder in, if at all. And it cur­rently can’t push your email newslet­ter to my Face­book pri­vate messages.

There are sim­i­lar prob­lems with other ways of authenticating.

Until there is one ID sys­tem that knows

• how you like to be con­tacted with­out being spammed
• what your home­page is
• what geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion you want to be asso­ci­ated with (which isn’t always where you phys­i­cally are, so GPS is out)
• your date of birth
• who your exist­ing friends on the new net­work are

and the other types of data you want to take with you, ask­ing peo­ple to join your social net­work, instead of fol­low­ing your blog, may not be the answer.

Not to men­tion the fact that you’re ask­ing for a big­ger social com­mit­ment.

Read­ing a blog every day or so, com­ment­ing when you feel like it, that’s like a casual dat­ing situation.

Join­ing a social net­work is much more like ask­ing your read­ers to be in a seri­ous on-going rela­tion­ship. What good social net­work doesn’t require the com­mit­ment to participate?

Is your audi­ence ready for that kind of commitment?

Are you?

If you’re not, Ning may be the answer, at least for now.

Yes, I said “may”. And also “for now”.

With Ning, you can cre­ate a top­i­cal social net­work on a net­work­ing site many peo­ple already belong to. You can even map the sub­do­main they give you to your domain name, for a monthly fee.

To explain why I say it MAY be the answer, let’s do an exercise.

Let’s say you do set up a site on Ning. Here are the ques­tions you now need the answers to, mostly in the affir­ma­tive, for your idea to have a prayer of working.

Is your audi­ence big enough that the small per­cent­age of them who will post to the forums and start their own blogs will be enough?

Expect about 10% of your cur­rent RSS Sub­scribers, and 1 — 10% of email sub­scribers to join. Only half of them will bother to do more than reg­is­ter unless you nudge them.

Given that, think about it again.

Do you have time to cre­ate con­tent and spark discussion?

And pro­vide video content?

Or mod­er­ate out spam content?

Or the money to pay some­one else to do it?

Even if you do, your data is still tied to Ning. If you ever want to cre­ate your own, sep­a­rate from Ning, who is going to export that data? And how?

And if you have a com­mu­nity now, who’s going to port all username/password infor­ma­tion into Ning?

Maybe one day, Ning will let you sub­scribe to a ser­vice that lets you com­pletely white-label its service.

You will still have to have a hot enough topic to keep it from being a ghost town.

Indeed, will your site topic ever be hot enough to get its own top­i­cal social net­work­ing site, for­sak­ing all oth­ers — like Face­book, for instance?

Or do you need to be con­tent with the option to have a Face­book pres­ence rather than your own network?

Not every inter­est group can sup­port their own social net­work, and of those that can, the first mover may be the one that pre­vails. There were at one time, thou­sands of forums about inter­net marketing.

But only the few best ones, and the spe­cial niche ver­sions, survived.

And if you are the first mover, you have to really think about how you’ll cre­ate, main­tain and push for­ward community.

No mat­ter whether the cus­tom social net­work is the answer, or whether it’s some other sub-section of social media that becomes our next obses­sion, it’s com­ing from the innovators.

So, social net­work­ing may be the next big thing in social media, or it may not. If it is, you have o make sure you’re ready for it.

I think that there are so few com­pa­nies that can sup­port that type of evo­lu­tion, that while social net­work­ing will become more pop­u­lar, it won’t be what busi­ness mas­sive adopts the way we did we did with RSS, blog­ging, social book­mark­ing and other social media tools.

I believe the next big thing in social media is some exist­ing inven­tion we’re not aware of yet, or some­thing that may have already been invented recently but is still on the fringes.

I had just fin­ished writ­ing about how great busi­ness blog­ging was when I waded knee deep into social media.

Now that social media sites like Twit­ter are spread­ing into wide­spread adop­tion, the peo­ple who alerted you to social media are already on the next boat.

The ques­tion for you to think of is, what is that next boat? The only hint I can give you right now is, watch the inno­va­tors and the early adopters who told us about RSS, blog­ging, social book­mark­ing, social net­work­ing and all the other new media.

As for me, I’ve got some­thing cook­ing that I believe will change our rela­tion­ship with online video for­ever, IF it can be pulled off, or is even tech­no­log­i­cally possible.

My idea, though immensely share­able, is also eas­ily copied. If it’s not the right idea, launched at the right time, it may also only be effec­tive in the short term.

So for right now, I’m just rais­ing the ques­tion to encour­age you to find your answer. So what is it? What are you going to do next in social media? What’s left to tackle? What do you think the next big thing will be?

In an upcom­ing post, I’m going to dis­cuss what I believe the change in strat­egy should be, as far as small and local busi­nesses, for blog­ging. Then this com­ing week, we’ll be talk­ing about “what ifs” for the social media horizon.