Why social networking fail?

Many social networking sites have come and gone, though it's easy to forget about most of them with monsters like Youtube and Facebook acting like they are the only kids in the classroom. Some have gone on to make their inventors of the year, but others have fallen into the gutter of floppery. Subsequent entries will focus on why they succeed and what opportunities they create.

1. Privacy concerns
The first reason I would highlight, and part of the reason why social networks have not really gained much traction outside of a self-selected group of people is the amount of privacy concerns that exist within certain age groups. Younger people are generally more immune to those but older people tend to worry about what the social networks in question do with their data and are worried that they will either be data mined or that they will suffer from identity theft. This anxiety has largely been driven by media emphasis on how your data on the Internet is unsafe and how there are “nefarious characters” running around the net.

2. No real reward or penalty system
Most social networks are putting a heavy emphasis on how many connection a user have. A user’s worth is based on his/her number of connection, not on the quality of those connections. This tends to drive a lot of people to try to connect to as many people as they can. Mary Hodder likens this effort to collecting baseball cards, an apt metaphor since the number of connections you have is no guarantee of the value of those connections.
However, few of the social networking sites are doing anything to gate the amount of connection. One of the nice thing on asmallworld is that it actually penalizes people for sending out invitations that were declined. I believe this is a good thing as it makes people rethink whether they want to attempt a connection or not.
The other question is the reward in social networking: what do I get for sharing my contacts? We know what the companies get but it’s sometimes fuzzier to see what extra value one gets from a social network. Some have done a good job at showing a sense of mission, whether it is job-related and expertise-related connectivity like connections LinkedIn or dating like… well, this is where it gets trickier.

3. Not granular enough
Context is generally missing from most social networks. For example, I may know Bob in a social context as a friend but I have no idea of how good an employee he is. Or I may know Joe in a work context but not realize that he’s not dating material for my friends. The lack of granularity as to the types of relationships is another current failure of most social networking sites.
The other thing that is missing from social network is a more fine-tuned approach to ranking relationships. Relationships are not binary. It’s not either someone is my friend or not. The truth of the matter is that relationships are very granular in nature: I may be a close friend to John, whom I’ve known for 20 years and hang out with on a daily basis and I may have been a friend with Peter in the past but haven’t seem him in 10 years. Yet, to a social network, if I added both of them as friends, we have the same types of relationships.
Similarly, there seems to be a trigger missing for evolving relationships: what if my relationship with Peter has been slowly degrading over time. Do I kick him out as a friend (an option few networks allow) or do I keep him on my list. This granularity is missing and it is odd that it doesn’t exist as it would be relatively easy to capture this data.
Situational relevance is another factor that is largely ignored by social networks today: in what context does that network function. It’s something that needs to be more granularly defined than the catch-all approach of existing implementations.

4. Not integrated with other apps
Should social networks be standalone apps or is social networking just a feature? There is really little value in knowing people just for the sake of knowing people. However, there is value in interfacing with those people, whether it is to find a job, get some information from a subject matter expert, find money, or get a new date.
I believe the real value of social network sites to the end user will eventually be discovered when they start integrating with other components like email and IM. Presence (is the person online or not), location services (where in the physical world is the person right now) and communication (can I phone/IM/email/page them now) would add greatly to the value of social networks.
However, at the current time, few efforts have been made to integrate the social networks with other apps. Which brings me to the biggest reason why social networks fail.

5. Walled Gardens
Social networking sites are walled gardens. They do not want to share information with others for fear that it will dilute their power as THE central hub for all relationships. This lack of interoperability is the primary problem with social networking sites and, I believe, one of the reason why their growth is impeded. A network that would be willing to open up could see better integration with other tools and could benefit from other sites connecting to it and creating more specialized sub-networks. For example, a large social networking site could become a large repository of a number of relationships with smaller sites looking at it to specialize across horizontal uses (for example, creating a site focused on dating or job search) or vertical ones (for example, a site focused on information exchange between subject matter experts within one particular domain).

Example of failed social networking site: Wal-Mart

This was Wal-Mart's failed attempt at a social networking site for teens. It was only online for ten weeks, with a preview left online for about two months after that. In many ways it was a MySpace clone where users could build profiles with graphics and text related to Wal-Mart products.
Why It Failed: To register for The Hub, user information was sent to parents in order to get approval. This attempt from Wal-Mart to avoid future lawsuits turned off many teens. There were also many obviously fake profiles on the site, from teens like "Beth" who just loved shopping at Wal-Mart in order to catch the eye of the cute guy at school. The myriad of advertisements for products cluttered the profiles and 90210-ish older models posed for the pictures of the fake teens.
What Can Be Learned From It: A successful social network needs to provide freedom for its users and as few in-your-face advertisements as possible.


Sources:
http://www.tnl.net/blog/2006/06/15/5-reasons-why-social-networks-fail/
http://www.bivingsreport.com/2008/a-look-at-failed-social-networks/

How can you handle risks that come with social networking?

Social networking -- whether it be Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter or something else -- is fast becoming a way of life for millions of people to share information about themselves for personal or business reasons. But it comes with huge risks that range from identity theft to malware infections to the potential for letting reckless remarks damage corporate and personal reputations.

Both IT managers and security experts remain wary of social networking, with many seeing few defenses for its traps besides plain old common sense and some form of antimalware protection. Most say their efforts involve simply educating those about the risks of hanging out on the social networking scene.

"Social networking in itself is a really great thing," says Jamie Gessein, MIS network engineer at Children's Hospital of the King's Daughters in Norfolk, Va. While impressed with how online is now bringing people together, he still favors blocking general access to social-networking sites unless that access is really needed. "Be careful of what you post," Gessein says. "I know users who post anything on everything on these sites. It is at times almost a contest to see who can outdo whom."

He thinks social-networking enthusiasts may be missing the point that this posted information stays around for many years and could come back to haunt them if a job recruiter tries to find out about their digital past. Gessein also believes people can end up in "the world for the forces of evil to exploit." Many agree.

Gaby Dowling, manager for IT manager for international law firm Proskauer Rose, says there's a sound business argument for using social networking sites such as LinkedIn, but she worries about the potential for malware being spread by exploiting trust. "The Koobface worm spread on Facebook was tricking you because you were receiving that from a trusted party," she points out. "Social networking sites carry high risks of infecting systems with malware," says SystemExperts analyst Jonathan Gossels, who adds, "At a policy level, employees should not be visiting social-networking sites from production systems."

Social networking is basically a "digital version of a relationship," says Greg Hoglund, CEO of firm HGGary, and the security expert who co-authored "Exploiting Online Games," the book revealing how cheaters can manipulate online games such as World of Warcraft.

Thousands of third-party applications are being developed for social-networking sites and essentially it all exposes "vulnerability surfaces to potentially crafted attack data," Hoglund says. "Furthermore, the potential attack data is piggybacked on a digital version of a human relationship -- somebody you know and talk to every day."

That means the "digital version of that person could easily be impersonated or exploited" and Hoglund doesn't see a simple way out of this dilemma. "In a nutshell, don't trust a digital identity like you trust a human relationship."

"People are revealing far more information than they should," says Gary Gordon, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Applied Identity Management Research, a non-profit group formed last October by universities, public agencies and industry to research key problems related to identity management. The potential for identity theft and social engineering through exploiting social networking is real, he says. But he doesn't see blocking social networking as an answer.

Eddie Schwartz, CSO at security vendor NetWitness, spoke about the risks of social-networking during the recent Infosec Conference. He mentioned identity theft, espionage and malware as potential threats.

"A typical Facebook or MySpace user session ranges for a few minutes to tens of minutes so you could write an application that farms personally identifiable information," Schwartz said.
In addition, he said he's seen evidence of government employees using social-networking sites suddenly "befriended" by people in other countries asking for information, raising the prospect of espionage attempts. The openness of many of the social-networking sites makes them "an ideal exploitation platform," he points out.

When it comes to online social networking such as Facebook, "try to educate people who have secrets to be careful," advises Michael Rochford, director of the global initiatives directorate in the Office of Intelligence and Counter-intelligence at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "They're putting themselves on a platform to be exploited."

Many companies, including Lockheed Martin, which is creating its own home-grown social-networking site for use internally, do block public social-networking sites for security reasons. But many firms these days would regard cutting off social-networking sites as bad business.

Social Networking - Cathay Pacific - Get Ready for Sevens

Hong Kong Sevens is the big sport event in Hong Kong and Cathay Pacific is a sponsor and Official Airline every year. In 2009, Cathay Pacific invited fans to be part of action by joining “Get ready for the Sevens” video competition to win grand prize. Participants needed to submit a 15-second video showing how they get ready for the Sevens. The top three videos were shown on the big screen at the Hong Kong Stadium on the final day of the competition.

Cathay Pacific promoted this competition through additional online social media:

Cathay Pacific Blog: Throughout March, they regularly posted new stories related to Hong Kong and the Sevens. For people coming to Hong Kong, it could help them to get more.

Other Channels: Cathay Pacific posted the updated information on different social networking websites. People could meet other fans and give feedback on Facebook, or get the latest updates on Twitter, or share photos on Flickr.

HOW DOES YOUR TEAM GET READY FOR THE SEVEN?

CX on Facebook
CX on Twitter
CX on Flickr
CX on YouTube

We can see that Cathay Pacific is using social networking to communicate with their customers very well.