Blog homeImagine you have a great idea for a social network.
Technically building it is the easy part - the challenge is to demonstrate the benefit of joining that network to potential users / members. And once someone has joined, you have to convince them to become active.
Take for example, WhoIsInTown (WIT) (described as “a London based company founded by 3 experienced business travellers who were continually frustrated by dead time on business trips, and as a result have developed the world’s first intelligent business networking site”)
You can go to their homepage and put in a few dates and just about get a feel of how useful the service could be (they really could make this demo experience much better - many of the demo searches provide no results - and seeing what a fully detailed response would look like would be helpful BEFORE telling potential members that they have to sign up for full features)
So they have gone the route of trying to show the benefits to the potential member PRIOR to that user becoming a member (just executed it poorly).
An alternative (which maybe they are working on as well) is “peer pressure”. The other day I got an invitation to join something called Blue Chip expert. Apparently this site is something like Linkedin but different. I don’t know, I politely declined to join as I couldn’t see the benefit and they didn’t mention any on the sign up form. However this didn’t stop the site from sending me an email recently saying my invitation would be shortly to expire…… and inferred that I may upset the person who invited me if I don’t sign up. In essence this makes your users your salesman. Pushy salesman as well. Not sure I like that.
A third way to build a userbase could be via acquisition…… yeah some larger travel companies are buying communities….. easier than building from scratch!
A forth way would be to do a “trojan horse”. Create one thing that people want to sign up for - and introduce your main functionality and service later. Then it should be an easy task to move existing customers to the enhanced service.
Final thought, I am launching a travel industry social network next week…… obviously I will announce it via this blog…. but we have the same problem - no existing users at launch. However, I am hoping that many who subscribe to this blog (that it is relevant to) will sign up and become active!
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