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July 27, 2006
“Social Networking” is a Construct (part 1 of 2)
Technological evolution is inevitable because innovation leads to innovation – not discreetly, but often by building upon or incorporating prior innovation. Some of those chunks of innovation can easily be described as building blocks.
We happen to employ a musicologist, and I was talking to him about how “Social Networking” is now officially a well-understood communication concept. The discussion led to a good analogy: It’s like music. Music existed before it was formally described, and when it was, it turned out that only 7 notes are required to express it. This was a surprisingly modern innovation. A composer friend of mine told me that Guido d’Arezzo, an Italian monk, invented what evolved into the current form of musical notation. He died in 1050. Before that, the concept of a “composer” was impossible. Of course, the innovation in music is self-evident, and most people can identify archetypical innovation, which is often subjective. Think about that for a second as it relates to mobile social networking.
I asked our musicologist to name some archetypical innovations in music. Off the top of his head he said:
- Percussion
- Wind instruments
- The Horn
- The electric guitar
- The Sampler
Take the horn. The horn could not exist before it was possible to process metals. Before that, wind instruments were made of wood, like the clarinet. The innovation in metal happened independently and most certainly not because of music. But it happened, and that innovation in metal was a building block that was built upon in the realm of music in the form of the horn, which was in turn a building block in music from which several different types of horns evolved.
The horn is now a construct of musical instruments in that you can compare all horns side by side and recognize obvious similarities. They are all conical coiled chunks of metal with a mouthpiece on one end, a flared bell at the other, and usually some valves in between. (Valves are an innovation: The Bugle has no valves, but by comparison to modern instruments, it is less functional in that it is limited to notes within its harmonic range.) Because of the established construct, to a complete layman, a trumpet really just looks like a small tuba.
MySpace is a tuba. Tagged is a trumpet. Tagworld is a flugelhorn. Facebook is a euphonium. Xanga is a trombone. Friendster is a french horn. Just as all of these instruments look the same, so do the social networking sites.
Compare every social networking site side by side (like I have) and you will find 99% feature parity.
Like brass instruments, they are all almost identical, but very different in their intended purpose and functionality.
Still, they all do the same thing. Here is the required list of things a social networking site must have to fit the construct:
- Profile
- Messaging and/or other contact options
- Gallery (publicly accessible collection of media)
- Friend list
- “Pull-based” subscription
- Self-publishing
- Public comments
- Groups or other common-interest nuclei
- Media or other specified coin of the realm and a way to share it
- Stats/Fame indicator
- Search
- Personalization
These 12 items are the building blocks that define the social networking construct. Other major building blocks that often exist but are not required to fit the construct include 3rd-party content, Presence, Rating, Community policing tools, Instant Messaging, Widget inclusion and “side-loading” of other (usually verticalized) personal content or communication tools. On top of that, there are dozens of other functional differentiators that we have identified, none of which sufficiently differentiates a site or service to break them out of the core construct.
(We have been calling all of these sites "media networking operators" or MNOs, since we started our company, but call it what you want. It's a construct.)
Email is a construct. No matter what client you use, there is an inbox, outbox, sent items, trash, composer, attachments and folders.
IM is a construct. No matter what client you use, there is a buddy list, presence indicator, composer, categories, emoticons and group chat.
So. Social Networking is just an evolved form of communication, but importantly, it is a repeatable undifferentiated construct with a low barrier to entry. This means we can expect increased competition, market segmentation and the effect of a fickle consumer base very willing to switch over to whatever site is new and interesting simply because it is so easy to do so. Even so, branding and community matter, and we see the network effect of these sites in full effect. Tagged skews very young, while Friendster skews much older – the post-college set.
Like Email and IM, consumers do not pick one social networking provider, and most consumers use more than one provider for different purposes.
What is more interesting about the social networking than email and IM is that it facilitates community-based communication rather than individual communication. Once the market figures out the core construct, it can then be replicated in context. For instance, Pepsi can launch a social networking site for a specific purpose. The coin of the realm may be free promotional MP3 (or some DRM-encrusted crap) files or PepsiPoints, redeemable for valuable Pepsi products, but the overall purpose would be to build a community around the brand.
This is in fact happening. Wal-Mart just launched their social networking offering called The Hub.
No not that The Hub.
This is a totally new and exciting The Hub, complete with “down wit it, yo” teenspeak designed to attract that “hip” young demographic. “Dig” this “fresh” copy on the home page: “Surf around for a while and check out what other people have got goin’ down on their pages.” I wager $100 that someone who wears a tie to work wrote that.
In fairness, it’s not really a social networking site because it does not have enough of the required elements to fit the construct. Messaging, the glue of community, is missing, which means this site will fail even if it attracts a lot of initial attention. It is intended as a contest site which is tied to their back-to-school “School Your Way” campaign. Create your page, people vote, you win something. Part of the MRD seems to have been “make it look like myfacebookyoutubespace.” They get mentioned here because someone at Wal-Mart intuited that there is a social networking construct, but they just didn’t know how to define it.
Another site that clearly understands the social networking construct is VictorME.
Victory Records is the #1 independent music label in the U.S. Do you like Hawthorne Heights? Atreyu? Silverstein? Waterdown? VooDoo Glow Skulls? So do I, and they are all on Victory Records.
I don’t know for sure, but I’ll bet VictorME started like this:
“Our bands on MySpace get a lot of hits. This is a great way to build community around our bands. Wait a minute, are people finding Hawthorne Heights on MySpace or are they going to MySpace to find Hawthorne Heights? I think it’s the latter. Why should we help Fox build their brand on the backs of our artists? Let’s build our own.”
Now, MySpace is undeniably a useful marketplace, but it’s A Place for Friends, not A Place for Music. VictorME applies all of the required elements of the social networking construct, plus it has a very specific vertical purpose – to galvanize the fan community of all bands on Victory Records. It will never compete with MySpace, but it is not trying to. It will, however, compete with the part of MySpace that has anything to do with bands on Victory Records. If one day Victory Records convinced their bands to take down their pages on MySpace, all of that traffic would go right to VictorME. Similarly, if VictorME offered exclusive content that was sufficiently differentiated, it would convince the hardcore fan that it is the best source of information and community about bands on Victory Records.
Every other record label can do the exact same thing, and it is rumored that many of them currently are working on it. Any brand wanting to build a community can apply the construct and have a chance of success – not of building a broad-based social networking contender – but of building a verticalized community around a particular nucleus of value.
What does this mean for the mobile social networking space? There are a bunch of implications, but I am out of time today and will have to expound next week. I’ll make the title of this post “1 of 2” which will hopefully create some urgency in my mind to finish my thoughts.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at July 27, 2006 11:44 AM
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