timtowle

A while back I talked about Affinity Circles and how I admired their model. Now they’ve expanded their taget market with the launch of I am A Trail Blazers Fan, a dedicated Social Network for the Portland, Oregon Basketball Team.

I think it’s a good move and is especially exciting if they can create lots of these focussed communities and join them into one big one, like they are doing within the educational space.

Sports is an obvious area for social media, and there’s a lot happening within the sports area, I’ll save that for another post.

I was telling my Friend Guy Bigwood, General Manager of MCI Group Spain, Europe’s largest events management and marketing company about how Affinity Circles had created a social network product for educational organizations and how I thought the model was interesting (see my earlier post on Affinity Circles). Associations are key for MCI, so guy asked me how Social Networks might create value for a Professional Association.

What are Professional Associations
Professional Associations exist for many different reasons (not every point, apart from the first, will be applicable to every organization):

- Promote and represent members (in some respects a Union for professionals, which historically some were).
- Promote and represent sector ; lobbying, influencing etc.
- Member education.
- Share and enable research and development.
- Education/communication to the wider public.
- Standards setting, especially when the associations represent new sectors.
- Quality seal/Element of trust that users may use to communicate their trustworthiness/authenticity to a wider public.

It strikes me that Associations are intermediaries and filters for their members to the wider world (and vice versa): They act as a hub for distributing information to it’s members and other important publics and their authority comes from the critical mass of it’s members. And the one thing that the Internet has proved to be very good at is disintermediation.

Challenges from the Internet
Assuming I was the leader of a large Professional Association the Internet would concern me for two reasons:

- Disintermediation. Bad SEO strategy and little relevant content online from my associations appears in search engines means that my association starts not to exist for many people. If I wanted to know about Neurosurgery and the best neurosurgeons in the old days I would go to the local public library, find the relevant associations, write to them and get the relevant information back. Now I search in Google where those associations may or may not come up.
- That my members will be managing their digital identities with other networks that have high digital visibility and may start to usurp my association in terms of critical mass. LinkedIn for example now has enough users that assuming those users have placed their various associations in their profile, must present a better way to search and surf of members of some of the bigger associations than the actual sites of those associations.

Objectives of associations on the Internet.

With these points in mind and knowing that the Internet doesn’t present just threats but also opportunities, I would make sure that my association embarked on a strategy that covered these key points:

- Good SEO strategy to ensure my associations position of leadership and relevancy in the search engines
- Position of leadership in helping members of my association create, maintain and control their digital identities with a 3 pronged approach:
1. Education of what their digital identities are and how they can be influenced.
2. Offering a platform where they could control completely their own profile and they could have a Blog if they so wished.
3. An advanced membership database that would, in lieu of the individual members maintaining their profile, would
   aggregate relevant information from around the net about individual them – much like ZoomInfo does (here’s Guy’s profile on ZoomInfo) This would be the best tool to motivate them to control their identities.

- A vertical search platform that acted as a key tool for the members, where they would actively add content, much like Digg, and that would become a destination site within my sector.
- Work with other networks liked LinkedIn to create and optimize the relevant group for my association within their platform.
- Create a question and answer platform (much like Yahoo! Answers) so that non-members may approach the association and it’s member to ask expert advice. I would then syndicate this content to Yahoo! Answers and Google Base and other question and answer platforms.

Essentially I would convert the Web presence of my association into an advanced Social Network that would aggregate to the wider web the members and their achievements. This way I would ensure relevance for my association in the digital world and create value for my members.

I remember vaguely when Affinity Circles launched, but it was interesting to catch up with through Online Personal Watch’s interview with their CEO, Steve Loughlin

They are creating a Facebook from the other side, that is from the point of view of the universties and alumni associations and not the students:

How can we create a trusted platform that provides value not only to users but also to organizations?

I think their model is great – they create branded sites for each organization, licensing the platform and then add-in value added services like employment and ads across the whole network.

This is interesting clever because they have chosen a large niche which they can hope to dominate, their clients give them stable income as well as building up the user base and then incremental income comes from the added network services. It also means that they aren’t just hawkers of generic social software.

I’ve followed Flixster since they launched as what we are doing is very similar in Linkara, all be it in Linkara we focus on books and music too, not just movies.

Mashable takes a look and talks about the site’s growth and the product, their summary made me laugh:

…they’ve got a great product that cuts straight to the heart of what mainstream America cares about. I’m surprised, therefore, that they’re based in San Francisco: it seems more like something the media moguls in Los Angeles would dream up.

Mashable reports on an eMarketeer survy that by 2010 Social Networks will be making $10BN in revenue. It carries the caveat that the Google-MySpace deal influences the projection a lot.

What I found most interesting is that the niche players like Dogster and Motortopia are included with very respectable revenues and makes me think that the possibilities of niche networks have only just begun to be explored. Six Apart’s CEO talks about this in a recent interview in Techcrunch:

To make an analogy, we believe we’re in a similar stage as cable television was in the mid 1980’s. There have been a few breakout hits like MySpace and Facebook, but we’re a long way away from having a diverse set of properties covering all of the different market segments and customer use cases.