MySource Matrix Section Name

It has been almost a year since I joined Facebook - the F-word as you might have come to know it. In that time I've gone from having two friends to two hundred, been voted nicest smelling out of a pretty torrid bunch and been forwarded countless Flight of the Conchords clips from Youtube.

Facebook stood up last year and made some significant changes to the way we socialise on the web - open API's (defined in wikipedia) resulted in swarthes of eager developers freely inventing everything  from ways to share my flickr photos to superpokes and magical fairies. Media types' eyes lit up with £££ signs as numbers soared and people shared all sorts of information that makes direct marketers think very happy thoughts indeed.

Here at Squiz we've seen a direct result of all this online social networking - a surge in the demand from businesses wanting to offer their own clients (B2B and B2C) a social network of their own. You  may well have thought the same thing. But is there any real value in offering your niche market a space to call their own? If you build it will they come?

I guess the place to start is the users. You must have users, a starting group for your network who actively interact with your company, your brand, your content, your products and services. If you don't have this user base stop reading now and start building one!

Next, it's important to recognise what you're offering them. Something that they can't get from Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace? It has to be. But we're not talking about fancy widgets or special effects (or heaven forbid, personalised marketing messages). The core of all social networks, by their very definition, is the social aspect of participation. What you need to offer people is the chance to network with like-minded people, a place where they can ask questions, share information and create meaningful relationships with others. In other words - if you run a successful gardening site, then you have a group of like-minded people - gardeners - and they'll want to talk to each other about everything from the latest landscaping tips to their favourite garden spade. But will they want to do this on your site instead of the gardening group in facebook? Why? Can what you're doing complement the gardening group on facebook or is it a competitor?

You have to make sure you can answer these questions and relate the answers back to your business plan...

Now, with a core group of users and a solid reason for them to network on your site you can get started. This is where managers get far too excited. Let's let them upload a picture (do they want to?), name their favourite five flower varieties (is this really of interest to the other gardeners?) and so on. You need to step back from re-creating Facebook's feature list. The possiblities really are endless. So you have to refine what you're going to offer ruthlessly. Cut it back to the core so at launch it provides all substance and no fluff.

Then you need to make sure the network launches with a bang. The last thing you need for your brand is a sign up followed by a deserted network site (why did I just give up my personal details???). Remember for every www.datingdirect.com there are hundreds of dating sites that died without a whimper.

So for your budding social empire, start off simple. Focus on your core strengths and your knowledge of the users that frequent your site. Let your users start interacting with your content and your staff through comments, ratings and forums. Use feedback from this experience to work out how and why they want to interact with each other on your site. Then provide them with website services that help them do it.

Oh and to do this seriously, you need to have a network champion - an employee who'll keep egging on your users, encouraging them to try things out on the site and make sure their voices are heard and good feedback is answered and acted upon within your organisation.

There is a place for niche social networks. But committing next years marketing budget to replicating facebook is an expensive experiment. Stay focussed, start small and try new things often. Regular readers will recall our communications 2.0 white paper - when it comes to web 2.0, beta really is better!