Social Networks are often criticized as having a hard time at being profitable. Most are supporting themselves in one of two ways, traditional online advertising, or a subscription model. But I wanted to briefly take a look at some other ways that social networks are trying to increase their revenue streams. Virtual Gifts The next largest monetization method taking form behind advertising and subscriptions are virtual gifts. With the massive success of virtual gifts in foreign markets (i.e. Cyworld) a lot of US properties have started experimenting. Most notably Facebook recently launched their...

A challenge for every online community is getting users to engage and participate. Many sites see an incredibly high churn rate for new users. A common response is to go back and add more features, change the layout, or edit the messaging in an effort to create more “hooks” to participation. But I contend that while all of these things may have an impact, the deciding factor of if a user will engage is the context in which they enter the site. If a user enters a site through an online advertisement, radio ad, spam, or some other blatant promotional effort, they don’t value...

I’m going to be in NYC for the Search Engine Strategies conference from Tues the 10th until Thurs the 12th. I will then be heading to San Fran, Saturday the 14th until Tuesday the 17th for some Web 2.0 expo fun. If any of you are going to be at these conferences or in the area and would like to meet up, email me; brian [at] socialdegree.com

We have finally launched the new public version of ZoomInfo. This was the first major project at zoom that I have been involved with. I wanted to go over the significant changes that we have made, in addition to addressing what I still think is missing. This list only cracks the surface. For the amount of work that was put in on the user side, there was probably ten times more work done on the backend. But this should give you a good idea of what you can expect to find on the new ZoomInfo. Background For those of you that don’t know what ZoomInfo is, we are a business information...

A very common question I get is how to gain users, and more importantly, how to get to that point of critical mass where a community becomes self sufficient in viralness. This process has never been easy, and contrary to popular belief, most successful communities did not grow organically. As time has passed, and the number of web 2.0 companies and social networks has increased rapidly. This has increased the difficulty of gaining critical mass for a couple reasons: 1. The amount of noise in the market is much greater. More noise means that it is tougher for your social network to gain visibility...

There is no shortage of mom niche social networks; Maya’s Mom, Mothers Click, MommyBuzz just to name a few. But there is one that has clearly taken a solid lead, CafeMom.com. I had a conversation with Matthew Zarzecki, one of the founders of CafeMom, and they are happy to announce that they’ve reached a milestone of over 1 million page views a day! The astounding part is that they have only been around since November 2006 (approx 5 months). CafeMom had a slight advantage to get ahead in this space by leveraging traffic from one of their other properties, ClubMom.com. But they...

There has been a lot of press around how OpenID, the effort to create the single-sign on, is gaining traction by adding some major players such as AOL and Digg to their pre-existing roster of Yahoo, LiveJournal, and Wikipedia. Having a single sign on is only the first step. How about a single portable buddy list? Taking OpenID one step further and allowing people to have a single buddy list does three things: 1. Solves a huge problem for new online communities by allowing people to quickly create their network. 2. On the flip side, solves the huge barrier for people who don’t want to...

In a lot of ways, social networks are becoming what forums were during web 1.0. While becoming a lot less popular, there are still hundreds of extremely active forums out there on the web. When I say active, I don’t mean a few thousand members and twenty posts a day. I mean ACTIVE. For example: Gaia Online - Forum about anime role playing Approx 6.6 million members, 967 million posts, Top 1000 Alexa Ranking Vault Network Boards - Forum about role playing games 626,000 Members, 112 Million posts, with 6,000 posts added daily Forum Auto - Forum about cars (in French) 350,000 Members, 20...

I have been closely following the new contact management system being developed by 37Signals called Highrise. I am extremely anxious to get a beta invite, as I have been looking for a solution like this for awhile. To read a little about some of the awesome features go here and here. While I have no idea if 37 Signals is thinking in this direction, I do believe the system could have serious social networking potential. I’ve said before that I consider LinkedIn to basically be an enhanced contact management tool i.e.the main use is to add people to your network that you have already met...

5 months ago I posted how the social networking needs of people dramatically change once they graduate college. There is a huge generational gap that has currently still not been filled. There are multiples SN’s that have captured the highschool crowd, including myyearbook.com and myspace. No one would argue that Facebook has fully captured the college crowd. And LinkedIn currently dominates with professionals 30 year and older. But as you see, there is a huge gap in between Facebook and LinkedIn. For most people, Facebook’s purpose dramatically changes once graduated. It becomes...