Highlights: Charlene Li’s blogpost on the future of social networks

Jump to Comments

I wanted to post what I consider to be the most important facets of Charlene Li’s blog post. I agree wholeheartedly with her, especially about her idea of having one social identity that can be  imported into different social networking services without forcing all of your friends and contacts to necessarily join that service in order to continue to be a part of your “social graph.” Meebo does this for instant messaging IDs and I can’t say how much I appreciate it. I can IM with any of my friends and contacts, regardless of what service they themselves use. Here are the cool bits:

Today’s social networks are a throwback to those early closed platforms, and they will be opened up by new “entrants” into the social space – namely, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, and AOL – who will leverage their deep, daily relationships with online audiences.

I shouldn’t have to tell a social network [who I'm friends with]. My social graph should monitor (with my permission) who I interact with, how often, and with what velocity (e.g. I reply to [some friends] immediately, but I may take a day to get back to someone else who has emailed me). This relationship map serves as the foundation for my social graph, while the explicit “friends” that I denote form another valuable layer.

Here’s an illustration of what this implicit relationship maps could look like (this comes from my May 2004 report):

In the context, the idea of social graphs being “owned” by different social networks makes no sense. Yet, all of today’s social networks build their business model and competitive advantage on having the largest, most complete social graph. The result: I have a close colleague who enjoys exploring all of the new social networks and “friends” me on all of them, figuring I’m a pretty good person to have in his new network. In a world with a single social graph, he would be able to import his existing personal, social graph into any new service, and immediately begin enjoying the new service without having to wait for his friends to catch up. And I would be spared the insanity of having to accept his umpteenth “friend” invitation!

The biggest hole and opportunity, IMHO, is shopping. I research and buy things online every day, and with rare exception, these activities take place outside of Facebook.

Today’s advertising models don’t work on social networking sites – that’s because simply targeting better on profile or social graph details is still the same old media model of CPM and CPC pricing. What’s missing is marketing value based on how valuable I am in the context of my influence.

This means that each person will have their own “personal CPM”, an idea I heard JWT’s Marian Salzman discuss at a private event in February (here are more details on the JWT’s Top Trends for 2008). The idea is that marketers want to reach highly influential people, and hopefully curry their endorsements. This has traditionally been the province of public relations, where they reach out to key influencers. But in the world of social networks, this is influence writ large and wide – every person has their own network of influence, and hence, their own personal CPM or value that they contribute to a social network.

…in a world of universal identity, a single social graph, and distributed social activities, social networks will have to compete on their ability to create an experience that can attract and retain the most valuable individuals.

2 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized