A decade after the World Wide Web entered the mainstream, people are increasingly accustomed to conducting much of life’s everyday business online — shopping, paying bills, investing, reading the news, playing games, listening to music or finding a date. And as social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace experience ever-burgeoning growth, hanging out online has become one more social norm.
The most successful social networking sites have developed versatile, user-friendly platforms that allow users to keep up-to-date — even up-to-the-minute — with friends, sharing favorite music, movies, books, events and photos. “It’s like the way we used the telephone [when we were younger]; our parents thought it was crazy that we’d sit at home on the telephone talking to our friends, not playing outside,” Zohar Yardeni ’01 says. “But to us it didn’t seem that unusual.”
Recently, social networking has been gaining ground with new audiences. One large segment of new users is those who may have missed the initial social networking explosion, having left college just as e-mail and the Web were coming into everyday use in colleges and in the workplace; another is those who first encountered online tools farther into their careers. There’s a growing recognition that such sites can fulfill an essential role, tapping into our status as inherently social creatures and providing networks of personal and professional support. As the first generation of users leave their dorm rooms to enter the workforce, and as increasingly older Web users discover the usefulness of online social networking, new sites are quickly evolving to meet the rising demand. Columbia Business School alumni are key players in a number of such innovative social networking enterprises.
“I thought that Burgundy was a grape,” says Philip James ’05, recalling his first job out of business school. As vice president of a wine company, he was responsible for helping wine specialists learn how to talk to the average wine consumer. James quickly found out why his was no small task. “There are 250 grapes and 2,500 regions,” he says. “There is no way that the average person could not be expected to act like an idiot in a wine store.”
To help inexpert everyday wine drinkers avoid that fate, in June 2007 James launched Snooth (www.snooth.com). Users build their profile by rating wines and learn about new wines by viewing the profiles of other users who have rated similar wines. “We really try to push simplifying wine to the forefront,” James says. “It’s not about people liking expensive wines, it’s about finding people that like similar wines as you and browsing their profiles for ideas.” Most often, people join in small clusters. “It’s like you and four of your friends who you regularly go out to dinner with,” James says, “and whoever knows the most about wine sets the pace.”
Like many second-generation social networking sites, Snooth “never aims to be a full-service social network,” James says; rather, “it’s about bringing people together who share a specific interest. And once you’ve built an audience, it’s an incredibly captive audience. If you are the average wine drinker, you come to our Web site every three days.”
“Unlike blogs or journals, which are about publishing a sequential set of articles, where old news goes away and new content replaces it, wikis are largely about content evolving over time and getting work done,” says Adam Frey ’05, founder of San Francisco–based Wikispaces (www.wikispaces.com), which was launched in 2005. “Something like Facebook is valuable when you have a group of people who want to keep up-to-date with each other rather than produce any particular outcome. Wikispaces is valuable as a social networking tool when you have work to produce.”
Educators — primarily K-12 teachers — are one of the venture’s key user groups, developing everything from study guides for students to classroom wikis that grow over the school term and from year to year. For example, students might create reports and multimedia projects on the wiki that, guided by a teacher, become a kind of living textbook customized to each class.
“What Facebook is doing is not inherently new,” Frey notes, “but it has executed extremely well on the simple delivery of a tool to a large number of people. It’s the same sort of thing we’re doing with Wikispaces. Wikis have been around since ’93 or ’94. The question is, can you deliver them to the people who need them in a simple and accessible way?”
Providing an easy-to-use interface is crucial for the Healing Project’s Voices Who Care initiative (http://vwc.thehealingproject.org), which helps people with chronic and life-threatening illnesses connect to online resources and support. “In the healthcare sector,” says Melissa Marr ’02 (EMBA), who oversaw the site’s February launch, “it’s essential for individuals to have a community and forum where they can truly become patient advocates and access information that is relevant to their experience, regardless of whether they are a patient, family member or friend.”
The site provides an easier way to reach out to others in similar situations. “And it brings the support group home,” says Marr, president of the Healing Project (and who was recently honored with Columbia Women in Business’s 12th annual Distinguished Alumna Award). Voices Who Care can be a boon to someone whose chemotherapy appointments don’t allow attendance at face-to-face support groups. It can likewise be useful to friends and family who may themselves need to seek support.
A few years ago Aliza Freud ’01 (EMBA) saw that marketing departments were increasingly confronted by tools that allowed consumers to fast-forward through commercials or skip them altogether and by such opt-outs as do-not-mail and do-not-call lists. Rather than trying to circumvent the consumer’s power to opt out, Freud sought a transparent opt-in solution that would work for companies and consumers. Her new venture, SheSpeaks (www.shespeaks.com), embraces the marketing power of social networking in an innovative, customer-friendly way, funneling members’ opinions to companies that want to capitalize on the purchasing power of women.
“We are about giving women a place to voice their opinions,” Freud says, “and then we are responsible for making sure those opinions get heard.” Members receive sample products or services and use SheSpeaks’s online forums to discuss them with other users. They also complete surveys at the beginning, midpoint and end of the product trial. Members are free to discuss any products and services with other members, not just those in trial mode. In effect, SheSpeaks is a perpetual focus group-meets-Consumer Reports tailored for women consumers that also helps drive measurable word of mouth and sales for its clients.
For Zohar Yardeni ’01 and John Londono ’01, launching RadiusIM (www.radiusim.com) was a chance to integrate location with social networking. “We try to provide users two things,” Yardeni says: “One, where are my friends now? Two, where are all the other people?
“John and I were impressed by some of the new online location tools coming out. And social networking was breaking out, and we started asking our friends over IM, ‘Hey, where are you? Who wants to grab a beer?’ We figured there’s got to be a better way than to BCC your 80 friends to see who’s downtown.”
RadiusIM allows users to surf for friends of friends, or like-minded others who share, for example, musical tastes, educational background or an affiliation with a sports team. Profiles pop up on an online map, and members use an instant messaging system to get in touch. “In a sense, Radius almost takes people off-line a little,” Yardeni says. RadiusIM’s demographic hovers in the under-30 age group, recently surpassing 1.5 million users. “Some people look at these online services and say, ‘Oh my god, that’s a step towards a brain in a jar.’ But kids today are still doing the same stuff we did as teenagers, and our parents did as teenagers. It’s just that they have a cell phone. And they have other tools.”
Other alumni are finding niches in the market for online social networking: Vince Ponzo ’03 is working with selectminds.com, a “company intranet meets Facebook.” Franc Carreras ’01 and his wife, Andrea, run SeaKnots.com, a site for sailors. Catherine Billon ’89 has launched RiverWired.com, an online community and clearinghouse for sustainable living.
Like the Web before it, the social networking phenomenon is poised to move beyond short-term trend and into long-term ubiquity: it’s becoming harder to find an arena that hasn’t embraced online social networks in one form or another. Whatever their different missions and demographics, at the heart of each of these enterprises is the recognition that it provides a new means to a familiar end: helping people connect.
Using New Tools to Harness the Power of the Alumni Network
One of the most enduring benefits of a Columbia MBA is access to the alumni community. To enable greater access to the breadth of knowledge, experience and opportunity that our students and graduates represent, the School has introduced its own social networking application. Unveiled in May, the alumni site now integrates directory information, job postings, industry-standard technologies — for example, Flickr, Google, Picasa and YouTube — Business School articles and other rich social networking features.
The application became available to all alumni in mid-May 2008; full-time students will have access beginning in the fall of 2008.
To learn more, visit www.gsb.columbia.edu/alumni.