Elliott Ng

Last night, I attended a Supernova2008 mixer at Wharton West. The topic was around Social Networks, in a discussion led by Jeremiah Owyang. The discussion was fast-paced and the participants were articulate. I also got a flashback to HBS, and after 30 minutes went by and I hadn’t said anything, I got the familiar HBS 1st year feeling that I wasn’t going to get a comment in before the end of the period! So then I forced myself to chime in! My photos are on a Flickr set.

Reception

Pre-reception discussion with Jeremiah Owyang. (HBS Flashback for Elliott…got..to..get…a comment in before I hit the screen…<raise hand>)

Here the insights I garnered from the session:

1. Social Networks in the future will be like air

This idea of the ubiquitous social network was bandied about even before Charlene Li of Forrester walked into the room. She had presented this meme at Graphing Social Patterns earlier in the week.

See Charlene Li’s post and her Graphing Social Patterns Slideshare. She believes that social network providers need to increasingly open up, and provide compelling social experiences by consuming feeds (on a permission basis) from other social networks. “Social graph lock-in” is not the answer.

2. If social networks are air, then monetizing them may be challenging

Joi Ito made the point that no one is making a lot of money on email, because its an open system.

Initially, players like AOL provided profitable walled garden solutions, only to have open systems ultimately win in the future. What about Facebook?

Jeremiah led the group to identify 8 potential revenue streams for social networks:

1. Advertising
2. Downloadable media
3. Subscription
4. Premium Services
5. Market Research
6. Specialized Content
7. Infrastructure
8. Executive Search (not sure this was the last point)

There was some discussion about the recent Nine Inch Nails album launch that provided people with ways to consume at different levels: Free, $5 album, $10+ double album, $70 collection, and $300 signed collectors edition albums. Coverage here, here, and here. They sold 2500 of these and made $750k while giving away other music for free. Huge insight here about monetizing rabid fans while giving away a free taste to create more rabid fans.

There was also some talk about Blyk, a mobile provider in the UK that enrolls only 16-24 year olds into the service. You get a free SIM with 217 free texts and 43 free minutes per month. In return you get 6 rich ads a day from brands that you whitelist. According to one person, they are receiving a 29% response rate! Often time the ad is bundled with a promotional offer.

People seemed to be talking about advertising in terms of display advertising like Facebook ads and Adsense. I personally think the future of advertising through social networks is more about influencing the influencers, and things like Techdirt, Meetup, Blogher, and other blog networks and communities are more the way brands are going to generate interest and following through social networks, not just impression (or even clickthrough) based advertising.

3. Mobile devices will play a big role in making social networks air.

There was some discussion about Mobile Devices, I guess because of the recent announcements about the iPhone SDK. Since I already use Twitter and Facebook on my iPhone, this seems like an obvious conclusion to me.

4. Social networks will be amorphous, layered, interconnected, and fragmented.

My insight from playing around with FriendFeed is that each social application will be centered around serving some specific need of a segment of the audience, whether it be wine, photos, sharing feeds, blog promotion, etc. Then these applications will consume feeds from across the web to serve as a context-specific digital lifestyle aggregator (DLA). Other applications will compete for attention by also combining things in a different way to serve a different context. This results in the following characteristics:

1. amorphous – (Jeremiah’s term) – social graph will be freely flowing from one network to another, and from one application to another.
2. layered – applications will add value to other applications data and mash up and remix it into more useful ways. Community will build at different layers of the stack, depending on what those communities are trying to accomplish. Friendfeed is a great example, where I’ve seen people commenting and voting on a person’s lifestreaming activity across network.
3. interconnected – as discussed in Charlene’s presentation
4. fragmented – there is not going to be a “centralized commons”. Successful social networks are really “social network platforms.” Twitter and Facebook are successful because they don’t open everyone up to everyone else, and create some barriers to entry for any one person’s social network. They are platforms for expressing one’s existing social graph with the right permissions so you don’t get spammed by people you don’t know or don’t care about. This means that technology will not necessary unify or change social behavior, but support existing real life social behavior.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the Supernova2008 conference already. Thanks Kevin for putting together such a dynamic group of people.

UPDATE:  Jeremiah Owyang covered the event here.  Kevin Werbach’s Conversation Hub will contain the ongoing Supernova conversation here.  Subscribed!  Renee Blodgett over here. Ted Shelton here. Brian Solis here.  Funny I have seen Brian’s name all over the Web but didn’t know who he was.  Now I do: the man with the really expensive zoom lens in the skydeck!