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Why Social Networking isn’t the Answer
When Facebook started to become the social networking site no one could ignore, I was one of the millions that signed up for the free service of meeting, mingling, sharing information and photos with friends and family through the new medium.
I decided, in those first few months after I got a facebook, to keep my myspace page. However, after a year of only going on the site whenever I got one of those annoying e-mails "Frank the Tank has requested your friendship," I decided that myspace was best left for high schoolers and became solely a facebook user.
My friends who still have their myspace admit they, too, don't check it as often as they once did. Facebook is their social networking site of choice. When it comes to their myspace pages, they are only activity-based users, only signing in if they believe their myspace page has experienced some sort of activity.
Since first signing up for Facebook over two years ago, I have since signed up for LinkedIn, a social networking site for business professionals. However, despite my vast career ambitions, I'm only logged in when I sense activity with my connections or to update something on my profile.
With the advent of the Wall Street Journal's new "Journal Community" and The New York Times' social networking features, called "TimesPeople," newspapers and magazines are trying to get in on the social networking craze.
I have to admit I signed up for “TimesPeople.” It intrigued me at first. However, after using it a few times I discovered it falls short. I really don't care what articles some stranger recommends. I just want to read! Also, having no one I know on the social networking site makes it a little boring. My friends share interesting articles through facebook, and they're not going to add another intermediatary site in order to get their opinions across.
Since the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are leaders in their fields, it can be expected that more and more print publications will follow down a similar path. Having more and more social networking sites dedicated to the same thing: reading and acquiring the news, will lead these publications to ultimately work against each other, much in the same way myspace works against facebook.
Each user is going to have their favorite social networking site and check, update, and correspond with friends on that site most frequently. In their world, all the other social networking sites will follow idly by.
Print publications are entering the social networking world too late. We all have our friends, our profiles and overall our internet habits set up elsewhere on the internet that to switch the majority of our time networking elsewhere on the web would be counterproductive.
Read more at: http://journalism3.wordpress.com.
I decided, in those first few months after I got a facebook, to keep my myspace page. However, after a year of only going on the site whenever I got one of those annoying e-mails "Frank the Tank has requested your friendship," I decided that myspace was best left for high schoolers and became solely a facebook user.
My friends who still have their myspace admit they, too, don't check it as often as they once did. Facebook is their social networking site of choice. When it comes to their myspace pages, they are only activity-based users, only signing in if they believe their myspace page has experienced some sort of activity.
Since first signing up for Facebook over two years ago, I have since signed up for LinkedIn, a social networking site for business professionals. However, despite my vast career ambitions, I'm only logged in when I sense activity with my connections or to update something on my profile.
With the advent of the Wall Street Journal's new "Journal Community" and The New York Times' social networking features, called "TimesPeople," newspapers and magazines are trying to get in on the social networking craze.
I have to admit I signed up for “TimesPeople.” It intrigued me at first. However, after using it a few times I discovered it falls short. I really don't care what articles some stranger recommends. I just want to read! Also, having no one I know on the social networking site makes it a little boring. My friends share interesting articles through facebook, and they're not going to add another intermediatary site in order to get their opinions across.
Since the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are leaders in their fields, it can be expected that more and more print publications will follow down a similar path. Having more and more social networking sites dedicated to the same thing: reading and acquiring the news, will lead these publications to ultimately work against each other, much in the same way myspace works against facebook.
Each user is going to have their favorite social networking site and check, update, and correspond with friends on that site most frequently. In their world, all the other social networking sites will follow idly by.
Print publications are entering the social networking world too late. We all have our friends, our profiles and overall our internet habits set up elsewhere on the internet that to switch the majority of our time networking elsewhere on the web would be counterproductive.
Read more at: http://journalism3.wordpress.com.
Tags: facebook, myspace, networking, nytimes, post, social, washington
Add a Comment
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Comment by Barney Lerten on April 17, 2009 at 12:27am - This very thread proves Jason's point - someone 'built it,' and there are SIX MONTHS between posts. So who is using Ning on a media Website? I'd love to hear about THAT.
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Comment by Patricia Fortunato on April 14, 2009 at 12:45am - Agreed. I signed up for "TimesPeople" awhile ago, and found it slightly useless for myself. When I'm on The New York Times site, I read the article I'm interested in and that's about it. This site is so intriguing and fascinating. Wired Journalists is my new Facebook...
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Comment by Jason Molinet on October 14, 2008 at 3:12pm
- I agree with you. The notion that big corporations think "If they build it they will come" is false. It takes an investment in time and resources to make a social network fly. But newspapers are uniquely positioned to do so. They have content unique to the community they serve. They are the gatekeepers...
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Comment by Zac Echola on October 14, 2008 at 11:58am
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I think the better strategy, long term, is to figure out how to interact with existing platforms through hearty use of APIs.
While creating local social networks makes sense on paper, I think it's much harder in practice since social networks and UGC aren't an easy sell to advertisers, especially on the local level.
Geographic locality seems to be such a small slice of the social network pie that turning it into money would be much harder than you'd think. Going down this path is a distraction. Facebook by default is local (the better word would be proximity). Twitter by default is local. Even nation- and world-wide niche social networks don't generate the wild traffic numbers people unfamiliar with the game initially expect. Growth happens in spurts, it happens slowly and without lots of patience and management* it will die.
I think newspapers need to do what they do best: Create content and sell ads. Online, we need to find ways to populate that content around the Web and find ways to generate revenue from that content distribution.
*One of the biggest misconceptions I've seen from editors and publishers is that all they have to do is turn on the network and it will self organize. That's just not true. In order to make it work, you need to put a lot of time and effort into it.
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- I disagree. I'm a Facebook fan. It connects me to my wide network of friends and colleagues. (Always hated MySpace) But I see a real niche for local social networks. The Times and Journal aren't local so their effort casts too wide a net. But The Hartford Courant or Asbury Park Press, as random examples, might be able to build a successful and engaging social network. Of course, Facebook has a communities app, but it falls short.
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