The problem of verticals

Verticalisation works in a lot of contexts. Social networking, alas, is not amongst those contexts.

The recent launch (BrandRepublic) of 30love, a dedicated tennis social network from the Association of Tennis Professionals and 10Duke, has prompted a new round of speculation that the threat to MySpace, Facebook and the general social networks will come from the growth of vertical networks that help people express niche identities. This is a strategy that has worked brilliantly in search - vertical search engines, what Charlene Li memorably called the third page of search, help people find properties and recipes and dates where Google only helps them find property sites, recipe sites and dating sites. Verticals work.

Or at least, they work for tasks. They don't work so well for identity. When the First World War broke out in 1914 every socialist party in Europe had sworn to oppose it in the spirit of internationalist working-class solidarity: in the event every socialist party except the Irish and Serbian voted for the war. Why? Because identity is multifaceted, and in the heat of a nationalist war the national identity of the workers took precedence over their identity as members of the international working class.

We see this time and again through history - attempt to define some people in the context of their membership of some group and they will surprise you by acting according to their membership of some other group. (Democrats are caught out every four years when it turns out that poor black Americans have voted for the Republican christian right.)

Identity doesn't compartmentalise well, or neatly. Socialists don't always vote as socialists: sometimes they vote as nationalists, or Londoners, or women. Tennis enthusiasts aren't tennis enthusiasts 24/7, and if they can express the minutiae of their tennis enthusiasm in the same format that lets them rave about French cinema or Nascar or apiculture they will. Social networking is about identity, and social network strategy has a lot to learn from political strategy. Lesson one: a social network that lets people express multiple identities in multiple ways is almost always going to dominate a network that tries to confine identity within a singular niche.

Comments

[jamescoops]

i think its worth distinguishing between "social networking" sites and "communities" here. All the evidence suggests that verticals do support communities (there's a forum for virtually every niche group and interest you can imagine). The issue is whether verticals support the specific bundle of social features (friend of a friend, profiles, messaging) that make up the typical social networking site. Something will replace/ upgrade all the forums out there, but it may be a different bundle of features for different verticals?

[Brian Balfour]

Great post and good insight.

However I think you also need to consider the context of the social network or community. Like vertical search engines with tasks, if the purpose of a community is to accomplish a specific task (especially) in the professional context, then niche does work...extremely well (look at ActiveRain, Sermo, Inmobile, etc).

In addition when comparing vertical to broad networks your definition of "dominate" depends. A vertical community could be a lot smaller, receive less page views, make less money, etc....but it could make stronger connections within that vertical then a broad network.