There are thousands of big and small social sites that could be sliced and diced based on their target audience, features, objectives, built-in viral tools, monetization mechanisms, etc.

New social media networks are launched almost every day. While those networks are different in many ways, there is one noticeable similarity – new and old social networks don’t share profits with their members.

Big Social Networks Do Not Share Wealth with Their Members

Big whales (Google, Facebook, etc) earn billions from ad advertising, and don’t share even one red cent with their users. Sure, we value these networks as sources of virtually unlimited information and convenient channels of multi-media communications with a valuable touch of private interactivity. Yet users don’t receive even a small piece of a golden pie that they generate for these networks.

Pseudo Profit Sharing in Small Social Communities

You can find tons of small social communities with pseudo profit sharing. The majority of profit is generated from displaying AdSense or similar ads. There is one big problem with this model though – you only share the revenue that is generated through your particular page, and to get any noticeable results, you have to drive your own traffic to those pages. If you don’t drive traffic – there are no clicks on the ads and hence no revenue. You don’t capitalize on the traffic generated by social community. The majority of such traffic is sent to the homepage, and that’s where the lion share of revenue is usually coming from.

Wazzub – First Online Community to Announce True Profit-Sharing

Wazzub is the new social community that actually promisses to share 50% of its entire revenue with its members. It is going to be a first social community that pays its members. All you have to do is join during pre-launch phase (launch is scheduled for April 9), and set up the Wazzub as your home page.

Theoretically, each member could earn 5-6 figure income. The idea is that Wazzub will display ads and special deals on a home page, so the more people join the community, the more power it will have negotiating rates and prices for special deals with advertisers. That’s why the nickname for this community is “the Power of We”.

Almost 3 million people have joined already. If all of them set the Wazzub as a homepage, that’s 3 million unique daily visitors. If every member opens a new browser at least 10 times per day (and hence visit the homepage 10 times), that’s a 30 million hits per day. And 10 times per day is certainly not the limit. Many people open new browser hundreds of times per day. With these numbers Wazzub won’t have problem attracting advertisers.

Watch this video where they explain in details how members can earn recurring monthly income.

Can Wazzub really make it?

While the concept of real profit sharing is interesting and buzz-worthy, certain ambiguities and questionable business decisions make me wonder whether Wazzub can really pull it off.

Let’s start with the name chosen for this community. May be it could be a good fit if the target audience for this social community was young punks or teenagers. Yet Wazzub wants to appeal to much wider audience. It does not seem to deliver the right branding message.

Many eyebrows were raised when people saw that Wazzub chose to use .info domain. Such domains are usually reserved when company wants to test the waters in the new niche market or build websites strictly for the purpose of providing information. For the social community a more established TLD is expected, usually a .com domain. Yes, it’s just a perception, but wouldn’t you say that branding is all about perception?

After a little research you will find that community actually will be built on a .com domain, while .info is reserved for the pre-launch activities. This confusion doesn’t help to build confidence in company’s management.

And finally, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Wazzub compares itself with Google and Facebook. These are real companies with clear business strategies and huge audiences.

It’s unclear whether Wazzub has a business strategy at all. Let’s face it. Just displaying ads on a homepage is not really a strategy. Though the traffic could be substantial, it’s not targeted. What is worse, the Wazzub advertising model attracts freebie seekers. And we all know that this is the least desirable and worse converting traffic you can find.

For the homepage idea to work, Wazzub has to build a sustainable business model around the concept of profit sharing and find the mechanisms to engage and profile its users providing them with impressive tools for multi-media interactions.

So what Wazzub is trying to build? Here is the quote from Wazzub: “a powerful search engine, a personalized news section, the best deals on the Internet and amazing entertainment features like videos and skill games, just to name a few”.
They also claim that they have a “state-of-the-art website with patent-pending technology”. Yet the business model is still pretty vague. If company tries to be all the things at once (which looks like the case based on the above quote) it rarely hits the mark. What Wazzub is really going to be? Will it be a shopping portal? A search portal? A social network?

It’s all very ambiguous at the moment, and the ship that doesn’t know its course rarely reach the right destination.

Conclusion: During the last few years thousands of new social networks, social aggregators, social utilities and social bookmarking sites were launched inspired by the success of Twitter and Facebook. Yet none of them is around anymore. Only a few survived. There may be many reasons for this failure, yet one of the most important reasons – the lack of clear business strategy.

Is Wazzub going to make it? I don’t know. But I sure hope they have a solid business strategy that is not based on hype.

As always looking forward for your comments.

Tagged as: Billions, Drive Traffic, first socail community that pays, Google, Inco, Interactivity, Launch, Lion Share, Mechanisms, Media Communications, Media Networks, Multi Media, Noticeable Results, Profit Sharing, profit sharing community, Pseudo, Share Profits, Share Wealth, Similarity, Social Communities, Social Networks, Target Audience, the power of we, True Profit, wazzub, wazzup, Whales

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This year some social media trends were dictated by the economic turmoil that affected businesses of all sizes. My prediction is that the same trends will continue in 2012.

On a wave of economic uncertainty we saw the birth of the whole new type of social media networks and applications focusing on customer acquisition. In other words, those networks and utilities concentrate on helping companies and small businesses to find the qualified leads and their interfaces are specifically built to nurture relationships with potential customers.

In these series of posts we’ll take a look at some of these networks and see how they can help your business.

We won’t be talking here about “the big 3″ social networks (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) or about Google Plus that grows with such speed that experts begin to question whether Facebook will be able to hold its leading position for long. Sure, each of those social media behemoths has evolving set of tools and resources which could be used to promote both established and start-up businesses.

However, those networks (aside from LinkedIn) are not specifically dedicated to businesses. They have a sort of “cater for all purposes” flavor. You can either discuss business news and the most efficient marketing techniques or you can share a picture of your cat and talk about your last vacation, the content is not limited to the discussions of business opportunities.

Furthermore, if you try to promote your business agenda too hard, you’ll be greeted with a cold welcome from your social peers. There are unwritten rules of social conduct and you have to play by those rules if you want to be efficient in utilizing the social networks.

Even LinkedIn concentrates on a social aspect of your business relationships rather than helping you to promote your business opportunities of finding qualified prospects for the company you’re working for.

Yet, there is a great demand for various social tools that could facilitate the process of business promotion and lead generation without the necessity of a “social dance”, and without the risk to be banned for over-enthusiastic business-angled approach.

Of course, if there is a void, it will be filled pretty fast in our age of market saturation and information overload. As a result we observe the whole array of spur-of the-moment business-inclined social initiatives. Some of them are more successful than others.

Today, let’s look at ProSkore. The idea of this social business network is great – it is supposed to serve as a sort of counter-weight to Klout. Klout concentrates on helping advertisers to find the industry influencers, generate buzz with their help and ultimately get more business.

ProSkore, on the other hand, helps influencers to find targeted leads and generate more business. The quantity of leads is linked to your professional score – the higher the score the more leads will be sent your way.

The shortcoming derives from the fact that they use a freemium model. Don’t get me wrong – there is nothing wrong with freemium model. Hootsuite (popular web-based social media management platform), for example,  uses this model with great success. For this model to work the company has to provide great value not only for paid members but also for the members who decide to join on a free level. Hootsuite offers a truckload of useful features even on a free level, that’s why it grows so fast.

ProSkore reserves its most useful feature- targeted lead distribution – for paid members, and unfortunately it doesn’t provide too much value for free members.
One way to overcome this shortcoming would be to provide a limited number of leads even to free members and to reserve the rest for the paid members.

Another factor that might be slowing the growth of this network is absence of the short “vanity urls” and a very buggy member lookup. The absence of vanity urls (short urls that could be easily remembered) is probably one the most serious factors that slows down a viral growth for this network.

If those hiccups are addressed, this network has a great future. In the next post we’ll talk about BranchOut. Stay tuned…

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Opening image from andreanna on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

Tagged as: Behemoths, Business Agenda, Business Opportunities, Business Relationships, Cold Welcome, Concentrates, Customer Acquisition, Economic Turmoil, Economic Uncertainty, Efficient Marketing, facebook, Google, hootsuite, linkedin, Marketing Techniques, Media Networks, Small Businesses, Social Aspect, Social Networks, Social Trend, twitter, Unwritten Rules

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Misspelled Domains – New Trend in Social Media

KnowEm, Flickr, SoKule, Klout, ProSkore, XeeMe – can you tell me what do these sites have in common? Sure, they all fill the void in social media management providing useful tools to facilitate various aspects of your social media marketing efforts. I am not going to talk about their features and benefits in this post, this is a topic for another article.

Right now I want you to take a close look at their spelling. Did you notice anything odd? Yes, they all have misspelled keywords as their domain names. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that the correct corresponding keyword-rich domains would be KnowThem.com, SoCool.com, Clout.com, ProScore.com and SeeMe.com. These are just a few of the sites in the long list of popular online social tools that have misspelled keywords in their domain.

It looks like misspelled social media-related domains is the newest social trend, and not the best one, I might add.

Misspelled Domains and Typo Squatting

There is nothing new in picking up misspelled domains, it’s an old traffic-generation strategy that lies somewhere on the border between black hat and grey hat (depending on the utilization of landing pages of those misspelled domains).

Usually it’s used as a form of cyber squatting (known as typo squatting). In short, marketers and hackers buy domains containing misspelled versions of popular sites. People make spelling mistakes every day. And they rarely notice it, especially if a site they arrive on after that is an exact replica of original site.

Depending on a misspelling, the traffic could be huge. I can’t even tell you how many domains with misspelled versions of “google” are out there. Marketers use such domains to sell their products. Hackers use them for identity theft (I told you it’s not a white hat approach).

Social Squatting – a New wave of Cyber Squatting

The newer wave of name squatting can be observed in social networks. Social influencers (social network users with tens of thousands followers) enjoy huge traffic to their hubs. So it was only a matter of time before misspelled versions of social influencers’ usernames would spread like a wildfire. I suggest a name of social squatting for this tactic.

How to Protect Your Brand from Social CopyCats

By the way, if you have a substantial social following, you might want to register your username on all social networks as soon as possible. Or some copycats will do it and ride the wave of your brand’s popularity.

If your time is limited, easiest way to protect your brand is to order brand protection service from KnowEm, they will register your usernames on over 550 various social networks.

Are Misspelled Domains Good for Branding?

So using misspelled domains for grey-ish purposes is nothing new. But it surprises me that popular social utilities deliberately choose misspelled keywords for their businesses.

Yes, I know it’s hard to register the relevant short keyword-rich domain these days. It seems like they all were bought a long time ago. But do you really think it’s justified to pick up a misspelled domain?

Think about it. If name squatting works very well then the opposite is also true. In other words, many people will type the “correct” version of your domain… only to end up on some other site.

And since percentage of typos is smaller than percent of correctly typed names, you willingly give away a lion share of your typed traffic right from the start.

Sure, now klout is a well-known brand, so not as many people make a mistake while typing this domain. Yet while they were climbing the ladder, they probably lost hundreds of thousands visitors who used a “correct” spelling of their keyword (clout).

A Real Life Example of Misspellings in Action

Here is a little story that made me right this post. One of my twitter followers asked me which online tools for social reputation management I could recommend. Among other tools I mentioned Proskore. The problem was that when I tweeted, I typed it as a “ProScore” which is obviously the correct spelling for this keyword. And that tweet went to all my 65,000 followers. Which means ProSkore missed a potential of substantial exposure to the earned media that could be generated from my tweet.

So if you’re planning to pick up a misspelled domain for your business – think about it –is it really worth it? Or should you buy a keyword-rich domain on a secondary market? Or should you look for a little longer domain name which includes a correctly spelled targeted keyword?

How to Minimize Brand Damage from Misspelled Domains

If you already bought a misspelled domain and started building your brand around it, don’t despair. Linguistics are important but there are ways to mitigate the negative influence of misspelled keywords by tying the semantic perception of your recipients with audio and visual anchors.

In one of the previous posts I reviewed one possible solution for this problem that was implemented by Sokule. Mascot, anyone?

Of course it’s not that easy to develop the right blend of semantic, audio and video experiences for a successful anchor with the right branding message.

So my advice – use it only if you’re already deeply involved in building your brand around the misspelled domain. Otherwise just pick the correct domain from the get go.
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Opening image from sixesandsevens on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

Tagged as: Black Hat, Clout, Cybersquatting, domain misspelleings, Domain Names, Exact Replica, flickr, Genius, Google, Hackers, Identity Theft, keyword-rich domains, klout, knowem, Marketers, Marketing Efforts, Media Management, Media Marketing, misspelled domains, Misspelling, Misspellings, New Trend, New Wave, proscore, proskore, seeme, social squatting, Social Trend, sokule, Spelling Mistakes, Traffic Generation, Typosquatting, Useful Tools, xeeme

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Amplify Analysis – the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

With this post we start a series of social media network reviews digging deep to find out what works in social networks, what doesn’t work and why.

Dozens of new social networks appear each day trying to mimic a social structure that could possibly lead to the astonishing success of well-known leaders in social space.

Yet many of the freshly cooked networks make mistakes that diminish their chances to become a prominent player in the social field.

Today we’ll look at one such social player – amplify.com, a site that chose a business model of social aggregator.

There are a lot of different aggregators, and they all pretty much parrot each other in functionality which makes them unworthy of any special attention. Amplify.com was smart enough to find its own unique angle which allowed it to stand out from the crowd. This network built its USP around one noticeable Twitter peculiarity –Twitter only allows messages with length up to 140 characters. For Twitter this feature became an arrow that pierced the wall of social noise and lead it to the breakthrough in social communications.

Yet for many bloggers 140 characters is a tight cell to express their thoughts, so when Amplify introduced unlimited text length for messages, ability to post in HTML format (read: possibility to create keyword-targeted back links) and combined those features with aggregator functionality, it made a strong entrance in a crowded space of social networks.

If you were a blogger who had a hard time to express your idea or message in 140 characters, but still wanted your message to appear on Twitter, you could just write a long post in Amplify, post it and it would be posted to Twitter, Facebook ,Tumblr, Freindfeed and many other social networks. No wonder Amplify was popular. Unfortunately after Google Panda update Amplify made some questionable changes, and now its popularity is shrinking.

Let’s see in details what was working in Amplify, what still works after the changes and what features should be redeveloped pronto.

the Good , the Bad and the Ugly in Amplify

The Good:

• Amplify has a good idea targeting a rather large market of frustrated bloggers who find it difficult to fit a message in 140 characters or less yet still doesn’t want to fell off the wagon of Twitter exposure.
• Amplify gives you the opportunity to schedule posts, so you can submit several posts at once but schedule them to be posted later at a specified time.
• Amplify allows you to post messages of up 1000 characters (which is still far more than Twitter does)
  Amplify allows you to distribute your message to multiple social networks.
• Since it’s a social network, it gives you the opportunity to communicate with your social peers (follow, them, send them private messages, etc) and build your own social community.
• Amplify allows you to post links in the post. Links can’t be keyword-rich anymore, but there is still some SEO benefit of posting to this network (though it’s significantly reduced).

The Bad:

• Previously Amplify allowed to post the messages of unlimited length, now the length was shrunk to 1000 characters.
• Amplify doesn’t allow to post HTML-rich messages anymore. Now you can’t make bold sub-headlines, have no ability to emphasize certain thoughts or add an image. Even worse, you have no chance to get considerable SEO juice through keyword-targeted anchor text. I think this change is the most important reason why Amplify’s popularity is decreasing.
• When you use scheduling feature posts get published in the dedicated time but sharing works in some odd way. We found that scheduled posts are not always distributed through all social networks.
  Amplify is often very slow which makes you wonder whether it would be a better use of your time to switch to other social aggregators.

The Ugly:

• When you post a message to Amplify, there is no way to add multiple tags or multiple categories. If you want to add multiple tags and categories, you can use this little hack: after posting a message, go to settings and click “edit your post”, then you’ll be able to add both tags and categories. Of course it’s not very convenient, to say the least.
• We also found that the last two characters of the post are often truncated which is especially bad if the last thing you have in your post is a link. If you use link shortener, a couple characters mean a difference between a link to your post and a link to some obscure site.

In conclusion: Amplify is a good example of a social network that has a great potential yet for now halted its own success by making bad business and development decisions.
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Opening image from on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

Tagged as: Aggregator, Aggregators, Amplify, Arrow, Astonishing Success, Back Links, Blogger, Bloggers, Business Model, facebook, FriendFeed, Google, Hard Time, Media Networks, Panda, Peculiarity, social aggregators, Social Communications, social media distribution, social media networks, Social Networks, social networks review, Social Noise, Social Space, Social Structure, tumblr, twitter, Usp

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