12!

To many people, online social community, also called social network is not a fresh term. However, besides facebook, myspace or friendster, how much do you really know about social network? I was not really sure how many types of social network are there too until we did this small research. Here we are, sharing our discovery – there are generally 12 types of social communities existing.

1.       Mass Crowd Communities
2.       Business Connection Network
3.       Industry Specific Social Network
4.       Community Built for a sharing application or content
5.       Match Making Communities
6.       Communities with same interests & hobbies!
7.       Education Related Communities
8.       Academic and Research
9.       Communities for Families
10.   Community for Internal Collaboration
11.   Community for Customers
12.   Social Network Platform for Niche Communities

Let us just pull out some examples to show you.

1.Mass Crowd Communities  

Social Network like facebook, myspace or tianya, although they began with only targeting at a specific segment, they have expanded to welcome anyone. People join with different objectives and there are many sub groups can be formed within.  

Advertisement and integration with online gaming are the common revenue streams for such communities simply because they have large membership and traffic. 

2.Business Connection Network

Famous online social networks like Linkedin, Xing or wealink (a China community) appear to be more popular to the corporate group. People come to these networks with a more specific objective – to create and maintain business relationship.

Premium services to obtain more information to enhance networking or increase appearance to attract more attention are very applicable to such social networks. For example, let’s look at what a premium account on LinkedIn can do for you.

3.Industry Specific Social Network

After mentioning the more famous one that almost everyone knows. We start to bring you to get to know those more target segment specific social networks. Industry Specific Social Network is a good transition from Business network like Linkedin. Let us just introduce one here – i-Meet. I-Meet.com is a social network created for the MICE (Meeting, Incentive, Conference and Exhibition) industry.

It allows meeting planners and service & product suppliers to connect. For example, if a meeting planner from Philadelphia wants to know more about the meeting facilities in Singapore, i-Meet is the place where he/she can find the right suppliers in Singapore and request for more information. Moreover, the planner could probably find out more information from other planners’ shared information like photos, videos and blogs on i-Meet.

The greatest value i-Meet has brought to the suppliers is sales lead generation. This is one of the strongest revenue streams for such a network. Remember, “lead generation” is the keyword!

4.Community Built for a sharing application or content

Having enough talks about business and money, let us bring you to another type of community everyone loves. Sites like Youtube, Flickr and imeem started with a core application for sharing for video, photo and music. As the membership grew, communities were built to facilitate easier sharing. You can become the fan of someone and you can see their latest uploads conveniently. Amongst this type of communities, I would like to bring your attention to a news sharing communities like NowPublic.com simply because before this research, I have not explored much about news sharing communities.  

The application of community has been extended further. A very interesting example is a site called Jujups.

Jujups has an application for you to DIY you own cards, mugs, t-shirts, photo frames and even chocolates in an extremely easy way. Kids love it, so is everyone else. More than just creating, you can check out how other people do it.

Communities like this usually can sell premium content. For example, on Jujups, you don’t really have to create your own chocolate. If you see someone did a very nice one, you can pay to have it. It is C-to-C business built on top of the sharing.

5.Match Making Communities

Match making is one of the most important application of social network too. We probably know how it works. You put up your profile and you check out people’s profile. If you like that person, you can try to connect with the person online. There are also many offline activities organized to facilitate the meetup. Of course, there are also similar communities not for seeking lifelong partners but just friends or short term partners.

Match making communities usually makes money through subscription or premium services like offline introduction and meet-up services.

6.Communities with same interests & hobbies!

I put an exclamation mark to express my favor towards this type of communities because it not about business, it is not about sharing but it is about meaning of life. Hey there, don’t you have some hobbies and you are always keen to look for someone to share the same joy?

Let me share with you my favorite ones. I love cats and I am active in mycatspace.com

I love scuba diving since the first time I did it and I am active in Scubuddies.com.

Communities like these have custom feature created just for the niche need. For example, I can keep my dive log on Scubuddies instead of carrying a book around and afraid of losing it all the time.

One strength of such communities is that the membership is very well defined and advertisers love it. Integration with e-commerce is also an obvious good way to bring revenue.

7.Education Related Communities

In fact, there are many sub categories of social network which is related to education. For example, many schools have online communities for the students and teachers. There are also communities for alumni. Here I show two examples which I find them most refreshing.  

BeRecruited.com is a social network to connect college coaches and high school athletes. Athletes can post their profiles to market themselves and the coaches can scout and pick the right talents and their teammates. 

BizAlum is an Alumni Community Portal managed by School of Business at National University of Singapore. Besides having most of the alumni members to join and interact, students are brought to be aware of this portal even before they graduate. This is for them to seek for advice and mentorship from the alumni. Somewhat similar to BeRecruited.com, recruitment is a great value brought by this alumni portal.

Communities like these are hard to determine what the best revenue model is. Most of them are driven by NGO and has sufficient fund to run it. Social value created is more concerned than monetary returns.

8.Academic and Research

Due to the exclusivity of some projects, we are not able to explore this freely as we like. However, there are living examples showing how effective the idea of social network is being applied in the scientific research.

Connotea.org is one social network for anyone to store their research references and shared with others.

In MIT, there is a Community Annotation Project (CAP), which is a collaborative effort to engage experts in the biology of Neurospora crassa to improve the quality of the N. crassa genome annotation. The membership consists of scientist from all over the world. We don’t get a login to see what it is inside and that curiosity to know more is still burning in my heart. \

Most of the time, such a community is driven by a public project and thus revenue is not really the objective.

9.Communities for Families

Connection between family members is the strongest and most long lasting in man kind’s society. Demand for such a community arises as the world is getting more and more globalized and family members are no longer living together but sometimes quite far apart.

Uniqueness of such communities is demonstrated by some very unique application just for families. For example, you can build your family tree.

Communities targeting at families can monetize by integration with family oriented services like photo printing, gift ideas, picnic service, family trips and so on. This is a field with huge potential.

10.Community for Internal Collaboration

Most companies see a strong need for internal community among employees for discussion,knowledge sharing and culture building, as an upgrade to existing office automation software. Here is one example.

In Techsailor, we use a social network as one of the mean to gel our colleagues together. Our email communication is meant for work and the social network is meant for all the fun stuffs. It is the “killer app” that helps us to attract many talents people to join us because it simply demonstrates how vibrant our company is. It is also a place for us to organize discussion and idea generation. Through real life experience, it does add a great deal of value into our working life in the company.

11.Community for Customers

These are communities set up by brands to aggregate their customers or potential customers to share, feedback and participate in activities. Such a community enhances customers’ experience and satisfaction. Also, it helps to up sale value added services and increase customer retention.  

Let us share one of the greatest customer communities around, the Nike Active Plus Community for runners.  

Runners can record their running miles onto the community, compete with friends and share training tips. Also, there are many running and walking activities around to boost the attention to the community. As Business Week put it, “Nike has built a legion of fans”. 

E-Commerce can be built within such a network. However, the Return of Investment of building and driving such a community is just not the amount of sales done within this network, but the brand loyalty and sale outside this network must be also accounted for.

12.Social Network Platform for Niche Communities 

These are also community platforms for people to set up their own communities. User can use one account to join multiple communities which they are interested in. Two examples here – ning.com in US and Jujuya.com in China:

Platform for Social Communities is very versatile. In fact, they have the potential of capturing even more member than facebook. One of the common revenue streams for such a platform is to provide chargeable premium features for the network. Jujuya.com is also integrating with e-commerce, mainly for business to reach the targeted groups of users.

That is all for the 12 types of social community. If you discover that I have missed out any, please let us know. Our research is meant for us to have a systematic study of what values can a social community bring to a business or organization. In our coming blog, we will be analyzing one of the social network in greater details to understand better how can a social network be positioned in the value chain to enhance efficiency of business flow. Stay tuned and have a great Halloween!