Back to Basics: What's Your Networth with Networking?

We know how Facebook revolutionized the concept of social networking and the story so far. Then came Twitter, Quora, Google+, Foursquare, Pinterest among others. Clearly the social bug has hit entrepreneurs, just as e-commerce did, not so long back.

A few weeks back, a woman entrepreneur dropped me a LinkedIn message, with an introduction to her soon-to-go-live online venture. No guesses on the idea-a social networking site, based on interests. Not surprisingly last week, I received a press release on the launch of? Yes! Yet another social networking site also based on interests, however, with the idea of getting people to meet offline. Online clubs and communities formed here are with the idea of introducing you to a new set of people you can interact and share experiences with offline.

Well, the internet is here to stay and everyone wants to cash in on the potential opportunities it offers. It has changed our lives in many ways and we cannot deny that. For businesses, social media, in particular, has become a de-facto marketing tool, a significant contribution, and for startups it’s a boon.

On the flipside, from where I’m standing, businesses based on ‘social networking’ seem like they’re going to go the e-commerce route-a me-too space, with a few smart ones left standing. Though the wave has just risen, I don’t see too many differentiators yet in terms of the model or product features. While user interface looks different, the value proposition is still superficial.

As far as users go, the proportion of people using such forums for the objective it was created to achieve versus those who join them just because it’s new, seems to weight more with the latter. It is safe to say that social networking has changed human behaviour. Many ‘netizens’ seem to draw their identity from the number of friends on their list, the tweets they tweet, the clubs and communities they join. Amusingly enough, a year back, one of my ‘followers’ on twitter commented, “You have just 16 tweets!” (Obviously I’m a bit primitive for some.)

For entrepreneurs go, looks like they are riding on this change. Which is fine and perhaps a normal thing to do since it’s hot. My question is-how many social networking sites can a person join and be active on in one lifetime? So how many more such sites are going to launch?

Currently, every feature offered by these newbies is already on Facebook. I don’t wish to undermine anyone’s efforts nor do I have an agenda behind this comparison, but it’s a plain fact. If ‘X’ is a social networking site based on interests, Facebook already has 1000’s of groups, communities active, which I can join at the click of a button. Nor does it take long for someone to form one either, if they wish to find people with similar interests. So why do I need to join ‘X’? There are only so many people in this world and has been said many a time -Facebook is the world’s largest country today.

More importantly, how many social networking sites have a model scalable enough to go public? It’s too early to say. I certainly don’t have any answers yet. My guess is as many as the number of e-commerce site that might, maybe less. The million-dollar question everywhere is: Will India produce a Facebook, Apple, or Google? The multi-billion dollar social networking site went public on May 18, 2012 and it’s already in the news for poor performance in the stock market. Anyway, that’s another blog topic by itself.

As a journalist, today if I hear of a brick-and-mortar business versus another e-commerce or social networking site, I’d opt to cover the former without a second thought. India certainly needs more of those in my view; we have enough disorganized markets to organize, enough problems around urbanization, infrastructure, energy, basic utilities that still need a solution. Today, we seem to use social media to voice our healthy and unhealthy opinions on all this, but how many aspiring or existing entrepreneurs are ready to go offline and find these solutions? Do write to me if you do.