I’m in a social fraternity at USC and one thing that everyone has problems with is keeping their Facebook groups, pages and events both private from non-USC students and as socially usable as possible. We use Facebook to share event dates, themes for parties, philanthropy details and invitations of all sorts…and so does every other fraternity and sorority across the nation!

So I thought — why not make my own social network that I can customize to meet my local peers’ needs? I could make a place about our Greek row that won’t get clogged with news and information from another college in another state!

…But then I pondered, “How can I make a social network?” I searched online for a few options, thinking at first that I’d have to buy an expensive domain name with a ton a bandwidth and hosting fees attached and find someone to help me with all of the advanced HTML and CSS to make it look good. I was wrong. I found several social network companies like Ning, CrowdVine, SocialGo, Elgg, and WackWall. All of which were capable of providing me with my very own free social network, but Ning gave me more of what I was looking for with a truly user-friendly and recognizable social networking platform.

The beauty of having a micro social network with Ning is they give you a plethora of easy-to-use customization tools that allow you to change your network to be as specific as you’d like. With a little bit of Photoshop skill, I made a logo, a header and some basic icon graphics, which all seamlessly integrated to my network, “The Row”. It’s also easy to keep unwanted users from spamming and abusing your network. I used the network privacy settings to require that new members must be approved (based on their name, email address and any other information you require they include when they sign up) before allowing them access to the site. Like the glory days of Facebook, when only ‘.edu’ email addresses were accepted, this keeps your network exclusive to a demographic, location, etc. that you determine to fit your network best.

To be realistic, I don’t think that my network or any micro-network created on a social networking site will ever grow to the size of Facebook or MySpace, nor do I believe that the majority of them will last as long. But I do think that everyday people can create great social communities for millions of active internet users to enjoy.

-Steve

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I’ve been feeling a little Twitter exhaustion lately and I’ve noticed some of you have too. It made me stop and ask myself a question: What’s next? Take a look at the tag cloud of this very blog. What jumps out at you? Twitter, Facebook — try and find one more and, yes, there it is — MySpace, and in that order of frequency too. Twitter is the IT network (yes that’s a pun) of the moment (and yes, even with Facebook’s shiny new mug).

I’m not here to deny Twitter’s permanent utility; in fact I’ll be back in a week or so to defend it. But what I am here to say is that overall Twitter, like most of its predecessors, will take a beating sooner or later from the victor of the next social media undercard. And with the telescoping of social and technological evolutions, I’d say it’ll be sooner rather than later — cough FriendFeed cough. Just in time for mom and dad to realize they’re still out of touch and for brands and businesses to scramble out of one strategy and into another.

And even FriendFeed, if that is the next craze of the masses, will become obsolete before you’ve known it. And so the question for me becomes — are we moving so fast and processing so much, so insatiably now, that this is the pace of the social media shelf life? My friends and I joke about singularity, so I won’t take it seriously here, but I do want to ask you what the benefits are if we only have enough time to realize we’ve passed what we’re looking at? I know it’s confusing. It should be at ludicrous speed.

I was on a panel recently and I got asked the question, “Now that our moms are on Facebook, will we still use it?”

My answer is that yes, for the moment, we will continue to use Facebook. But we’re all a little more guarded now, aren’t we? Remember what happened when mom got on MySpace? We all fled to Facebook. Now mom is on Facebook and we’re all fleeing to Twitter. Mom will be Tweeting a lot sooner than she was friending on MySpace and Facebook. Mom is catching up fast!

The bigger picture is this. We’re building bigger social networks and getting farther and farther away from the people we really want to talk to. When Facebook first started, it was a place for just college kids to talk to other college kids. You were privileged to be part of this network. I had an intern show me what it was like to be on Facebook and I admit, I was quite jealous. Facebook was a response to MySpace, which had gotten way too big, too crowded, and in the words of those college kids, too annoying. Facebook was theirs.

Ask a college kid today if they still like Facebook and they’ll tell you they do. Because there is nowhere else to go. Sure, they Twitter, but it’s not the same. But ask that same college kid if they’d prefer Facebook was the way it used to be and they would let out a big sigh and say, yes!

Which is why I believe we will see a reversion of sorts in the social networking space. We will see smaller social networks created for segments of the population based on careers, demographics, ethnicity, location, education, etc. I often say that it is only a matter of time before we see PlumberSpace, a place for plumbers. Instead of tens of millions of people in this social network, there will be tens of thousands. Maybe less than ten thousand. But it will just be for plumbers. Mom definitely won’t want to hang out there. But plumbers will. Plumbers will go there to talk about plumbing. They’ll ask questions of each other like where do you buy your tools?, what is the solution to this problem?, should I incorporate and set up a 401K? Consider it crowdsourcing for handymen.

And it will be sponsored by Lowes or HomeDepot. It won’t be worth $2 Billion. It won’t go public. It will be a small and very targeted community. Smart advertisers will trip over themselves to get their wrenches and augers featured here.

Right now we’re all enamored with the big toys. Facebook is great because we’re reconnecting with people we haven’t spoken to since 3rd grade. But we’re also reconnecting with people from 3rd grade that we don’t want to remember. At some point soon, we’ll want to go to a place where we connect with only the people from 3rd grade that we want to connect with. A place like PlumberSpace.

Here are my 5 top line thoughts:

1. A) LinkedIn is the best PERSONAL social network tool for business. Meaning that it is the best way to promote yourself. Now, as a company, I want to make sure all of my employees are up on LinkedIn and I want to make sure their commentary about the company is fairly similar, but with their own flair. If people are researching my company, I want them to know that they can look up individual employees to find out more about us.

1. B) LinkedIn for your business – Create a group, a thought leadership organization about your specific skill. For example, I wouldn’t necessarily start a Fanscape Group, I’d start a Digital Word of Mouth Marketing group. I’d be the founder and I’d lead the discussions, so that people can always refer back to me, but I’d do it in a thought leadership manner.

1. C) LinkedIn for your business (cont.) – I still recommend having a company group as well. This is more about having your employees bond together and exchange information between them. This is public, so people can peer into your company, but more of a transparent internal tool than an external one.

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