Lately, a lot of new Niche Social Networks dedicated to verticals are launching every month. The rhythm of the releases is getting faster: almost 1 - 2 new Niche Social Networks start every week.

The criteria for grouping are very heterogeneous: from social situations to demographic conditions, to personal interests.

It's time to ask which one of these three ways will be predominant in the Social Media Universe

• Users will find their favorite Vertical / Niche network and stick with it


• Users will only join General Social Networks and abandon niches


• Users will be able to choose the right Social Network in relation to who they want to talk to: peers, colleagues, relatives, groups, etc. (I had an interesting talk about it with Nicola Rovetta)

While the first way seems now unlikely and the second is still a trend today, tomorrow might favor the third kind of approach, which resembles real life approach: you choose the place to go depending on who you want to see. Yesterday Russ Unger tweeted to me something interesting about the possibility of convergence between yammer and twitter which demonstrates this thesis: "@stefanomaggi @robfay says we can use HelloTxt to update both, but I like the separation. Different people, different approaches".

Brands will reasonably lead this situation, developing, endorsing and promoting vertical communities of interest, as well as consumers (users) will show their goodwill for brands who favor and promote their networks. The brand's target will positively be matching to the consumer's communication target. A single user will be able to refer to a very specific group of people, so the brand will.

Here's the list of some Niche Vertical Social Networks. I'd like to make this list grow, so please send your links if you have one.

• CaringBridge: dedicated to sick and dying people


• Women on Career Break: for women on career break (developed under Ning)


• GayWallet.com: for gays and businesses


• E.Factor: for investors and enterpreneurs


• Breastfeeding.com: for brith-related medical professionals


• MyTruckingspace.com: for truckers


• TotSpot: dedicated to little babies, kids and parents


• NurseLinkup: for nurses


• MyFolia: for gardeners


• Eons: dedicate to baby boomers


• LifeAt: for people who live in the same building

Two days ago Google announced SearchWiki, a service that allows you to "search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results".

Is this just a new feature of the most popular search engine? I think it's a sign of change. Today you can tell how "advanced" a user is just by considering his / her ability to live a customized digital experience. SearchWiki is Just the last of an enormous group of tools that empower users to see only what they want to see and to live only experiences they want to be in. Twitter (by aggregating peers and interest groups), Delicious (by aggregating bookmarks), MySpace (by aggregating passions), iGoogle (by aggregating contents) are just examples. Advanced Digital Consumers look for a fully custom experience, they want and need to be targeted and profiled.
Personalizing on-line experiences doesn't mean avoiding brands and advertising, it's the opposite: it means establishing relationships only with favorite brands and on favorite topics. In other words, a will for auto-profiling. Companies and brands shouldn't be scared and be brave enough to risk and reach the consumer where he wants to be reached.

Before the video about WikiSearch, I'd like to quote David Armano, about building affinity with a service and customizing the digital experience:

Sustainable strategies take a bit more planning to target and grow over time. Think applications which evolve and grow over time. Users, consumers, and customers build affinity for that service through the interactions they have with it. These become both interaction and feedback "loops" which over time can be sustained if designed right. Thing about iGoogle.

Looking for a new home has never been so social. I've personally been searching for my next home for the last months and I know what the search is about.

The on-line approach is: Google, Real Estate Website and... usually not much more.

But today (well, tomorrow) we (will) have... Dwellicious. A very nice social application that allows the user to bookmark homes and share them in a social environment.



Thanks to Dan Wolley for giving me a pre-online access to see it. The website will be released on January 2009.

How does it work? Couldn't be simpler:
1. Add a bookmarklet to your browser
2. Bookmark your favorite properties
3. Go to your personal bookmarks page http://dwellicious.com/yourname



Dwellicious is simple but quite revolutionary: it allows the home seeker to find the new place to live by looking through listings not through real estate websites.

Needless to say it will be a great opportunity for Real Estate brands to stand out: only the ones that will offer value added listings with value added service will be bookmarked and spread also through Dwellicious. This social bookmarking application will favor brands that offer an excellent product, have significant values and great positioning by representing a very interesting digital channel. Dwellicious will put in second place brands that rely just on awareness to attract consumers.

And, eventually: isn't it just comfortable and useful to have a single place to see all of the properties you fancy?

I'd like to know when it's opening in Italy. :)

There's so much Digital Content on-line sometimes it's difficult to keep track of where it comes from.
Anyway, the situation can be sketched out.

I think a recent post by Jeremiah Owyang about Curated Social Content is really interesting for this matter and I had the chance to write about it a couple of weeks ago, dealing with Brand Characters, Brand Evangelists and Users.

Jeremiah wrote about content, I wrote about the source of that content. This scheme briefly represents a sum of the two.



All of the on-line Digital Content can be grouped into three kinds of approach: Branded Content, Curated Social Content and User Generated Content.

Ther are also many kinds of content generators, who we can order from the most "branded" ones to the Consumers.

• Brands


• Brand Characters, part of the brand's universe but with "human" appearances


• Paid Experts, who have authority and write for the brand


• Brand Evangelists, who love the brand and spontaneously spread content about it


• Passion Verticals, who love the subjects (and the industry) they write content about


• Users, who write also without commitment for a brand


• Consumers

Brands generate directly Branded Content, or they aggregate User Generated Content into a new kind of content: the Curated Social Content.

More details about content and user types

• Jack Myers about Curated-user generated Content


• Community Curated Works


• Brand As Facilitator


• Technographics Profile of Consumers on Social Media

Do you want to be friend of someone? (Well, it's not quite as easy as adding him/her to your Facebook friends)

• First of all, you have to be sure your "prospect" friend knows you. Go meet him/her in places he/she likes to visit and - if possible - try to be in those places with people that he/she already knows and likes: this will help to give a better feeling about you.
  You might want to appear to your future friend a certain number of times, so you can have good possibilities to be seen and remembered.



• Now that your "prospect" friend knows you have a name and what you look like, it's time for phase two: gain his/her trust make sure people who know you and already trust you speak with him/her and tell what a reliable person you are.



• Try to show him/her something he/she is supposed to like, maybe supporting his/her friends or endorsing someone else's action that you think he will appreciate. This will allow him/her to consider you an interesting person.



• At this point one of the hardest part comes up: you need to make him/her clearly understand that you're different and even if you have much in common with other people, there is something that makes you unique. You need to take a position that clearly defines you as a person.



• After all this struggle, it's time to ask for something back, don't you think? Why don't you try to involve your new friend, asking him/her to prove his/her commitment for you? Maybe just a little thing, something that might please your other friends as well as him/her? You don't need to be explicit. Just set up situations and activities to which he/she might want to contribute and see how it works.



• You're almost at the top, but you still need to work on two things. Your new friend now thinks you're very cool and supports you. But you also have other friends, which you might want to involve and to present to each other. You could benefit from their interaction and each one could gain a lot exchanging his/her thoughts and feelings with each other. Whether they talk about you or something else, they will very probably be thankful to you for these interactions. So go on, host them and connect them.



• Now show you have strong values built in your DNA. This will add more strength to everything you've done so far and will eventually persuade your friends that you're really unique.

Now that you're done, you might want to start all over again, to find more and more friends.

Now why did I tell you all that? Of course you have friends and you know how to get new ones and the reasons why you might lose some. And it looks a little scary to think about a workflow for achieving friends.

So why don't you try to replace "friends" with consumers and "you" with the Brand? The seven steps perfecly match the Brand's path to success and if you look around, you will see how your digital life is filled up with touchpoints that represent nothing but one of these steps.

A little collection of examples and case histories from the on-line communication world could help figuring this out:

• Step 1 - let them know you. Display advertising has always been a great way to spread awareness about a Brand or a product. The digital version of it definetly serves the purpose, also allowing some advantages: it can be targeted better than off-line and it can transfer additional content to the consumer that help to better remember the Brand. See, for instance a Volkswagen banner, focusing on product and brand awareness.
  See, for instance, Cornhill Direct building brand awareness through an advertising campaign.


• Step 2 - be interesting. That does your target like? Try to meet it in places and in ways he love. This will make them associate your Brand to those. This is how contextual targeting works. It will let you be interesting for your target. Google AdSense is an example of this tendency.


• Step 3 - gain trust. Endorsing digital situations and features that your consumer appreciates helps a lot to enjoy benefits from it. Take as an example Intel's endorsement of Digg (sponsoring the new visualization features), part of the strategy that one of the most famous web strategists (Jeremiah Owyang) would define "Fishing where the fishes are".


• Step 4 - involve your target. Now you can ask your consumer to do something for a little reward. This will allow you to look appreciated in front of your target and will give you the possibility to show what they do for you. Contests based on user generated content rely on this thought. Give something to the user to get something back from him. As an example, you can see the beatifully crafted Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of the Cartoons. Burger King asked this talented author to realise a collection of episodes. After releasing them, it's all up the the users: now they can dub the episodes and realise new and very itneresting content, letting everybody know their appreciation for the Brand.
  See also: R.E.M. Supernaturalsuperserious.com initiative, wher the fans could remix the video of the song, showing how much they love the band. And please, replace "fans" with "consumer" and "band" with "Brand".


• Step 5 - you're different: show'em. You need to make them understand how different you are. All of your on-line communication choices reflect your positioning. There could be so much to demonstrate for this point. Each single part of a web strategy shouts out loud how your Brand is positioned. See, for instance, Dell's Social approach vs Apple's Un-social approach.


• Step 6 - host and connect. You need to make the most out of your friendships and let everybody know how much other consumers love your Brand. Host interactions and conversations about you or about topics near your world. Users will appreciate the possibility you're giving them. See as an example: Wal-mart social approach. Allowing everybody to say anything about your Brand makes your Brand stronger and more respected.


• Step 7 - values. Your Brand should act according to its values, giving users the possibility to understant how coherent its strategies are with these values. Google wanted to party its anniversary by stressing its passion for innovation, by setting up a valuable prize for inventors.

On-line communication covers all the stages of Brand development and allows to reiterate them as much as needed. Since on-line the interaction is direct and immediate, Brands have the greatest possibility ever to reach the consumer directly. This allows to be fast, near the user and very effective.

Human-to-Brand interaction can look a lot more like a human-to-human interaction today.


With this whole project the consumer develops a strong relationship with the Brand . Thanks to the web's strong commitment to concrete actions, it gets very easy to reach an engaged consumer with a commercial call-to-action.

Moving on from on-line branding to on-line marketing.