KonzeptioNerd

Why XING works

Over the past few weeks, the meme’s been going round that online communities have reached the long tail. Put bluntly, this means that the market for friendship (or “social”) networks is about saturated. It’s time to diversify and differentiate.

Indeed, one might ask whether “social network” is the only viable community-modell - or, for that matter, the only viable web2.0 paradigm.
One community that works quite well, as a community and as a business modell (even if the shares tanked recently), is XING, the social network formerly known as OPEN BC. The charm of the XING idea (in the U.S. more prominently employed by LinkedIn) is that the user benefit and the business case conflate 1:1.

XING is for people who (aspire to) work in industries and tiers were being well-networked is considered a qualification. Pulling more and more new members into the community is very much self-serving to existing members: Every new contact I peg down adds to my reputation - a reputation that does not only live within the confines of the community but emanates into my professional live.

On the other side of the equation, more new members is all XING INC needs to be successful, because more new members translates into more paying members (though not necessarily in a linear relation), more relevance for advertisers and a stronger (= more valuable) brand.

But this spin is very specific. Without incentivation (like a small premium for every new member an existing member invites), it works only for social networks - and only for those that cater to people to whom a large network has a tangible real-life value (as XING or LinkedIn) or with main themes that rely on mass.

It works for MySpace, because MySpace has developed into a marketing-platform for musicians who benefit directly from a large friend-base. It might work for Zoof, the Family Network, now in public beta. Zoof offers its users the tools to start, maintain and expand their family geneaology online - to “unite the world in one family” (as their claim goes). The more people I pull into the community, the more complete (and the larger) my family tree can become - and eventually, I will experience how everybody in this world is potentially related to everybody else.

But even for dating-communities, the auto-generation of new members starts to fail: Every potential partner I can bring in will be exposed to my rivals (so I won’t invite potential partners into the community) and everybody else is a potential rival (and I certainly won’t invite in rivals to compete for a date).

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