Supernova Mixer in SF: “Social Graph for Fun and Profit”

Thanks to Kevin Werbach who invited me to lead a roundtable at Wharton West (yes, the business school) in San Francisco last night. The topic, “Social Graph for Fun and Profit” was intended to let the attendees engage, shout, argue, and come to agreement on how we can address this new world. If you’re not familiar with the social graph, here’s how I explain the social graph to executives.

I agree with Kevin, there are so many ideas, not everyone agrees with everything. Present were many CEOs, VCs, Analyst, Entrepreneurs, Googlers, Bloggers, Consultants, and quite a few folks from Adaptive Path.

Elliott Ng attended my session, and shared his viewpoints on how the future will be amorphous, layered, interconnected, and fragmented. Rene Blodgett, who loved my clothing choices for the evening, also shared that we’re having a shift with the Advertising & Marketing Sea Change. Ted Shelton posts that his favorite comment was Advertising is transactional. Brian Solis took some great event photos (I’ll add more to this link list as they emerge)

How can the Social Graph by “leveraged” to increase member attraction?
The audience said:

Clean up experience.

Email inbox is shifting to SoNet Inbox.

Members “punish” spammy app devs.

Niches are ok, segmentation better than mass.

Need to prevent site becoming ‘over popular’ so it doesn’t dilute.

Improved Infrastructure (API/Standards/DP)

Option for a premium service sans advertisements

Make ads part of the social experience

Members can define the ads they want (see blyk, which gets good CTR)

Teens may be a fickle audience

How can Social Networks monetize?
The audience said:

Challenging, if it becomes like ‘air’ (like consumer email)

Point: the tertiary parties around the social network will monetize

LinkedIn is a utility, the value add is more than pure social networking

Different ways to monetize:

Advertising

Download media sales

Subscription

Premium Services

eCommerce

Market Research

Specialized Content (Tiered content “NIN”)

Value added services for niche audiences

Marketing Services

Infrastructure (B2B)

What is the future of social networks?
The good people said:

A few big players “the highlander” or

Will be many small niche contents

Digital Lifestyle Aggregation

Focus on ‘people’ –not so much content

Teens drive adoption

Geography and culture shapes communities

Social circles (a different type of culture) shapes communities

Device Dependent Social Networks (mobile cultures adopt differently)

Device “in”-dependent as well.

Aggregated Social Networks with control will occur

If you want to learn more about Forrester’s perspective on the future of social networks, read Charlene’s master post on how Social Networks will be like air.

Conclusion:
We certainly did not solve any industry problems, but plastered quite a few options folks should be thinking about. Not everyone agreed on every topic, so it was a very active ‘live wiki’ type of event.

Thanks Kevin and Wharton for hosting a great event.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Social Graph, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.