Blogs

Social Network Theory/Uploading Address Books/Tagging the World with Business Cards

September 28th, 2007 by Mike Mann

To build a social network, a company wants to reach a critical mass of users as quickly as possible, especially if they want to sell the company before it becomes too entrenched or risky, for whatever reason. Once you have convinced one consumer to join your network, your best bet is to encourage them to invite their associates to that same network, thereby creating a perpetually compounding cycle. Much of the success of Linkedin, MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, Flickr, various GoogleApps and the rest is their ability to compound their user bases quickly.

Irrespective of their short term profitability, many of the sites with social network hooks are able to create great services and give them away for free to a lot of people, quickly. A main premise of our work at WashingtonVC is that our sites and technologies should be inter-linkable for maximum leverage and efficiency. In other words, we want to make everything possible into a social network of sorts, and do so successfully. Web 2.0 social network methods are truly innovative and therefore appealing to the broad technology community, potential customers and the press alike.

Most sites that we work with have a capacity to open themselves up to social networking, open APIs and other methods of efficiently expanding their user bases if they haven’t done so already. Today, social networking is the low hanging fruit for a serious industry site. The most compelling way to open up your network after you give away a free account is to immediately seek ways of getting all members and visitors to upload their address books, and then automatically contact any of their friends or associates using a properly vetted conversion process. The “upload address book” theory is the one that I think is most appealing today. In fact, we should use a program that harvests all email addresses from customer’s PCs if they want, and then they can control which friends and associates to distribute invitations to their new, free, cool, properly incentivized network.

On another note, the rest of the low hanging fruit in the industry is Yield Software, or other optimization and analytical technologies, a conversion tour in flash on every site, a “live” operator in chat or video chat. As well as a flash or PPT product presentation, an upgraded graphical image and brand, an active blog, a prominent phone number and other responsive contact info linked to CRM, LinkedIn profile links. Considerable testing and trials of SEM and SEO strategies, good branding, assertive IP development and protections, innovative business associates with reliable linkages, completely tagged and indexed dynamic content, good UI, modern search and browse technology including parametric, and possibly surveys and sweepstakes. Anything to hook them in, keep them and get the same from their friends as efficiently as possible. Look for this stuff across WVC’s network of companies.

What else is up? Maybe you are sorry you asked, but here is more low hanging fruit: give everyone in your expanded business network special business cards with serious promotions on the back, meant for other “high level” people to build your network. You don’t merely want to tag the Internet with your messages, offers, links and content, but you want to infest the physical world with your tags. Presumably, business cards are among the cheapest methods to put your tag in the wallet or on the desks of the right targets. So for example, if Phone.com gives a one month free trial online and on PPC to hook in consumers, then on the back of the business card, they could offer a 6-month free trial instead, so the card has real value. Other companies could create their own high-level promotional hooks.

The idea is that within our network (or yours), the leaders of each company should carry the business cards for the leaders of the other companies, as long as they are compatible and noncompetitive. This phenomenon would benefit all consumers, companies, investors and employees in a positive cycle–all stakeholders’ boats rise with a rising tide. If for some reason a company doesn’t want business cards with marketing hooks, they should still test advertising specialty items like calendars, pens, shirts and more innovative trinkets that can be successfully spread around your target community.