By Joe Procopio

Social networking is the way of the future!

Rupert Murdoch seems to think so, donating a hefty sum to those rock stars
of the information superhighway over at MySpace to further monetize the unkempt ramblings of teens, tweens posing as teens, dirty old men posing as teens, and scam artists posing as hot blonde teens who like rainy days and just want to be your friend — a common occurrence which has become the MySpace equivalent of spam, or phishsing, actually I’m not sure what the endgame is, I just know that there’s no way that many girls want to know that many nerds.

Seriously, have you ever been on MySpace? It’s like being in a lunchroom at a high school in Indiana only everything everyone says has been written by the Wayans brothers and vetted by the Disney channel for hip factor.

So that acquisition was a cute move, and we all had a good laugh until Google, whose founders now appear to have been relegated to being the Cheap Trick to MySpace’s The Killers, went all mid-life crisis and put up billions and billions for YouTube, a site that’s just as noisy and annoying as MySpace but without all that eye-stressing reading and conscience-soothing copyright nonsense.

They’ve lost their minds, right?

Social networking is a huge sinkhole!

Ask anyone who knows anything about the Internet and its myriad get-rich-on-paper-quick opportunities. They’ll tell you that social networking is nice and all but there’s no money in it. Of course, these are the same people who told you there’s no money in Internet advertising, Internet shopping, Internet applications, or if you go all the way back, the horseless carriage.

The truth, the scary-ugly-boring-old truth, is that social networking worked really well during its last incarnation, when it was called community, and before that, when it was called webzines, and even before that, when it was called homepages.

And to give myself street cred, before that when it was called Compuserve (You Guessed It rules!).

Social networking exists to provide tools for people with like interests to connect with the purpose of helping each other reach their goals. Actually, I just gave you the definition of networking – when you add the word “social,” which describes MySpace, Facebook, etc., the definition devolves by assuming “reach their goals” means “brag about how much cheap beer you drank last weekend and how much money you make while pining about how you never each other anymore because you’re too busy drinking and making money.”

And there is no way to monetize that kind of data exchange, I’ll give you that.

My point is that the whole fad – and it is a fad – built around social networking is too focused on the content and the demo. But no matter how much money an 18-year-old says he has, he doesn’t have it, or at the very best, it isn’t disposable. What is disposable is going to be spent on cheap beer. So unless you’ve got the advertising contracts signed with Milwaukee’s Best, Pabst, and Busch ready to go, the content is worthless.

I’ll repeat that for those of you working on MySpace 2.0.

The content is worthless.

But there is money to be made. Seriously. You just have to think long term. The “social” part of social networking is the phenomenon behind the demand for the tools: the web space, the GUI for the design, the blogs, the photo albums, the message boards, etc. Essentially, people want the place to plop their content without thinking too much about it because, even though the content is worthless, that’s what they care about.

And I’m not being facetious or necessarily mocking your average MySpace user… beyond the mocking I’ve already completed. I’m saying that the user only cares about the content, and doesn’t want to take the time monkeying with the presentation.

This is why MySpace is so ugly.

And it’s also why web design firms hate it.

Social networking, much like community, passes over the middleman of presentation. And when the tools behind the phenomenon work their way into corporate America, there’s where you’re going to find your monetization.

Imagine a MySpace just for entrepreneurs. Or doctors. Or left-handed socialist gardeners. Any time you can put those tools around content that matters, you’re going to open the floodgates of monetization in an area the Internet has been waiting for – valuable customer-generated content.

This is why LinkedIn is the missing link between social networking and commerce, but employment is a slippery slope. Remember actual physical networking events circa 2001? They became a circus of hundreds of people looking for jobs at an event attended solely by people without jobs. LinkedIn is in danger of becoming the digital equivalent of said phenomenon.

So being the MySpace of Shortish Plumbers Who Are Also Mariah Carey Fans is not going to make you rich, because at the end of the day those folks are too busy threading new faucets and learning “Someday” on the recorder to have enough passion at the end of the day to wring out an article or two on “What Mariah’s Bathtub Must Look Like.”

But it’s out there, that goldmine, waiting for the right company at the right time to have its multi-billion-dollar idea using community, excuse me, social networking’s toolset to bridge the gap between MySpace and content that matters. After all, it hasn’t been that long since Google jumped on that new-fangled, noisy, and ugly world of webpages and found a way to make a mint out of cataloging them. Sure, it seems like a legit idea now, but no one was exactly clamoring to be in the search engine
business when the Internet was all Monty Python fan pages and downloadable Simpsons icons.

So now maybe that YouTube move doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

Joe Procopio is the founder of Intrepid Media, a consulting firm (intrepidmedia.net) and publishing company (intrepidmedia.com). This column, along with several prior installments and ridiculously snarky new material, will be included in Gleaning The Cube, his forthcoming book. Joe can be reached at joe@intrepidmedia.net. Joe’s profile can be found on MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, mediabistro, and the online court records of certain counties where “fun is apparently illegal.”

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