Social Networking World Forum - Day 1

Last Monday I headed over to Olympia with @AdParker for the Social Networking World Forum, Day 1. RealWire were one of the media partners for the event.

The day was littered with fantastic speaker, first up was Julie Meyer on how social media business can make money. She gave case studies on Ariadne capitals portfolio of social media clients who have had success.

Slicethepie - A financing platform for music, which has partnershiped with Bebo
Zopa - A well established social lending platform
Monitise - A mobile banking service with 10'000 customers a week
Lickerish - Celebrity image syndication with a clever business model
10Duke - Bringing offline communities online

Julie summarised the characteristics of these enterprises:
- Willingness to accept change
- Inspired Dullness
- Surf the Tsunami
- Attention to interface/design

Alex Halliday then impressed me, a 23 year old with a great business brain. Alex founded SocialGO which he described as the "Long tail of social networks" as they make bespoke networks.

Alex gave a great timeline of social networks:
2000 Disconnected > 2002 Friendster > 2005 Major Players > 2008 Connectivity

Other notes; 1 network cant cater to all people, Applications cannot capture niches, Ning has 800'000 networks, not everyone wants to join Facebook/MySpace. 50 cent's network has 600,000 members!

SocialGO can be white labeled and has integrated functions such as advertising and paypal which allow for good business opportunities.

Netlog were one of the first social networks, Lorenz Bogaert noted that they are in 25 languages and have 40 million members.

David Jones from Friendster reminded us of emerging markets, as Friendster is number one in Asia. It is a top 10 site for traffic in the world, and top 5 site in the mobile internet world. m.friendster.com had 1.5 BILLION page views in a single month!

Michael Donnelly from Coca Cola commanded the stage, starting with virtual thirst and then going onto Cokes Facebook fan page. The fan page isn't run by coke it is run by fans! It is the number 2 fan page on Facebook. The two admins were asked to make a video for coke, which was fantastic!

Interesting Coke keep social media marketing in house, they feel it is important to have real relationships.

Dirk Singer from Cow PR gave tips on marketing in a recession. According to Marketing Sherpa social media budgets are up 28%.

Other notes; social bookmarking not being picked up by digital natives, companies not claiming usernames and UK housewives spend 47% of free time online!

Some great slides from Dirk:

The Air force blog assessment seems like a good way to interact and would work in any social media manual.

After watching the Panel I finally got the chance to speak to Will McInnes after seeing him speak on numerous occasions and communicating on Twitter.