Emerson Direct Marketing Observations

Guess what? If you’re a marketer or an advertiser or even someone who wants to get some skin in the game. There is still time. According to Informa’s latest report entitled “Mobile Social Networking: Communities and Content on the Move,” the number of mobile social networking users exceeded 50 million. Which is roughly 2.3% of the worlds mobile user population on December 31st, 2007.

The research company argues that with only low investments from mobile network operators, the growth in users and community registrations will continue at a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 30-50%, depending on the type of community and the region.  So think about it, low-ball figures still put the CAGR at 30-50%

 So in less than 4 years, there will be between 12.5% penetration of mobile social networks among mobile users globally in the most conservative scenario and approximately 23% in the high growth scenario.

In 2006, mobile social networks made more than US $1.5 billion and that amount more than doubled in 2007.  Though revenue growth will accelerate in the next two years  much depends on mobile network operators’ policies and the interests of users after that to determine whether the growth will be sustained, flatten out, or decline.

By 2012 revenues generated from all business models in this industry is forecast to reach US$28.9 billion in the most conservative scenario and $52 billion in the high growth scenario.

What is safe to say given the ramp up by all arms and legs of the Entertainment industry is that the biggest community segment revenues will be seen within this market.  Look for entertainment to overtake all other industries in some regions by 2010, If they have not already.

 Other community segments — like those focused on productivity, fame and social shopping — are beginning to emerge on mobile platforms, diversifying their offers and attracting different kind of users… Thus expanding the social awareness and acceptance of mobile social networks. 

Apparently not too important to the folks at Bebo According to Royal Pingdom (great name by the way) which measures downtime using Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service.

Bebo’s downtime has increased significantly lately and has had by far the most downtime of the 14 social networks monitored for the survey. More than 12 hours of downtime in less than two months is a lot, and it could possibly be caused by the new open application platform that Bebo launched in December, allowing third-party developers access to its platform, Facebook style. It could be putting more strain on Bebo’s systems than they anticipated.

The two giants in the field, MySpace (with 25 minutes of downtime) and Facebook (with one hour and 35 minutes of downtime), can both be considered to be within acceptable limits, especially MySpace.

Social networks, just like any other websites, will occasionally suffer from downtime, either planned or unplanned. However, social networks have a different type of usage than most websites, with frequent visits from the same user and many page views per visit. Therefore downtime can often be even more noticeable and frustrating to social network users.

Below are the results of the survey.

* According to Royal Pingdom: If a web page is not reachable, returns an error, or takes longer than 30 seconds to load, it is considered as down. Downtime is always confirmed from two geographically separate locations.

Well ecademy was certainly interesting. Priding itself with the tag line; “Successful business people join ecademy to do more business”. After the relatively pain free login, I was taken to this page that had sooo much information for me to read and soo much information that they wanted, that I became somewhat discouraged and I’ve decided to move onto the next site on the list. Not a good start for a business social networking site. It shouldn’t be so hard! One note, I keep getting lots of unsolicted emails from users welcoming me etc etc.. The only difference is their names aren’t Mandy, Ashley, and Monique…

Next on the list entremate and I have just clicked on the darkest, most illegible eula/t&c I have ever encountered. God knows what I just agreed to. Time to edit the profile. Not much here to be honest, and it seems to be essentially a bbs. Now how far is that going to get me?

Next up was Friendly Favors, I’m going to give them a second chance on a first impression since I was getting database errors for the better part of yesterday.

Konnects, I liked, it was fairly intuitive and easy to set up and the influx of emails wasn’t too bad. That’s one bad aspect of Ecademy, they like to spam with people essentially “there” to help you. But we’ll see. Here is Konnects pitch: Do more with Konnects Get your own professional space online:

Something to remember is that with all social networks, it doesnt happen overnight and with each network that you are in, you have to get your bearings and contribute and share and grow your page and your presence. With that being said, When I logged in to Networking for Pros, they essentially said, screw the advertiser model, we want your money to use our site. So I said to Networking for Pros. screw you, I want free. And Off I went.

Real contacts touted itself as a social networking site but really its the old Monster jobs site model. Its employers connecting with job seekers and nothing more, so I was outta there. And on to Ryze I went. I signed up and was fully expecting quite the expereince given all of the back slapping it gave itself. But to be honest, I didn’t think there was much under the hood. You know one of the things that a lot of social networks assume is that you are able to or want to,”invite your friends”. Has it dawned on anyone that maybe you don’t have any friends or maybe you don’t wanna invite anyone within your circle? That might be why Facebook has a leg on all of these. They allow you to look for your group and just join. Then it’s up to you to connect within the group.

So I came away from Ryze with a shrug of the shoulders and a “oh well” attitude with zero expectations. I liked Spoke, it had a nice interface and essentially asked for the same ole same ole in regards to the information it was looking for, but it might be worth going back and building on the intial info that I have provided them. The last one in the group is Teng which is is a professional community of selected Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, vice presidents and directors of technology with organizations ranging from startups to the global Fortune 100, from non-profits to government agencies. The interface sucked so I’m not sure if it’s just a source site for someone to collect names. I went through the initial steps, so I’ll let you know.

Ok, so I have gone through all of the sites that were on the list and for now I’m going to focus on 3 of them for now. Those will be Spoke, Konnects and Ecademy. Those 3 seemed to be the best of the bunch and may have the most potential for something. I’ll try and go back and contribute and share and upload and do the things we do in social networks, but for now, you’ll just have to wait and see. One more thing, I did not include Linkedin and Plaxo, which were suggested, because one is clearly THE business social network at the moment and the other is more of a tool for sharing contacts.  So I wanted to look beyond those. especially the ones that I can get something from without shelling out any coin. Have I missed one, that we should evaluate?