Social value revisited?
From the Flickr of mag3737
The conventional thinking in social media is that the value of a social network is directly tied to the number of users/members. The huge valuations placed on companies like Facebook, MySpace and Linkedin are directly tied to the number of users in each network. However,it seems to me there’s a bit of a problem with this thinking.
As I wrote last week, I think that the real value in social media resides not with the networks but instead with the users. It is with other people that people want to connect/interact – not really with social networks. Consider the ease with which super networkers like Robert Scoble or Jason Calcanis are able to move from one social network to another bringing along hundreds (sometimes thousands of followers) and it’s difficult to see how any social network can consider its users or user-base a proprietary asset.
Judging by the rise and fall of most social networks, it feels that the best any have been able to do is “borrow” some of this value for a period of time. To me this is further vindication for Google’s social media strategy of building social features into existing sites and properties. Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, etc. are transitory places at which we’ve decided to interact with friends and colleagues. They aren’t permanent structures and, I think, can vanish as quickly as they appeared.
Am I missing something?