cre8Buzz Blog

So, one of our users gave some fantastic feedback. They broke down their thoughts on our market opportunities.

He did a great job, I thought it was worth a post!

Here’s my thoughts on the specific 5 opportunities listed:

1. I understand what is said here, but with so many different companies offering free or low cost opportunities to create individual social networks (Ning, KickApps, etc…) I think as the demand for networks in those niches surfaces someone with a large, pre-established offline network could easily build an online network with thousands of built-in members. Essentially, I think this would make a sub-section of cre8Buzz irrelevant or a secondary destination point at best. Still, I think having the niche categories on the Buzz for members to join is an important part of the business model. I just don’t think it is a significant market differentiator.

2. Social networking communities in which content is king already exist, on both ends of the spectrum. On one end, you have the social media sites, like Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Propeller; then, on the other end you have Newsvine, Gather, Zimbio and more. These sites have tens of thousands to millions of members already, and it’s not easy getting people to leave them to spend more time elsewhere for a similar service. Again, it is important that the Buzz features content heavily, and I like that content plays a bigger part in Karma points than social activities; however, this too is not a market differentiator.

3. A whole new user is coming….really? I agree that the Buzz is filled with friendly people, and I’ve made some amazing connections here. I believe that others could do the same too, but…Technorati says that there are 15 - 20 million bloggers out there, yet in reality, there only a couple hundred thousand worldwide that are really active. I’m not sure exactly how believable this point will be to anyone who is already invested in Web 2.0 companies, and I’m also not so sure that you want the Buzz to be known as the training ground for newbies (it implies that once they figure things out that they will ditch the community and move on to more sophisticated things).

4. You had me on “promotion of content and people,” and then you lost me on the rest of that paragraph. In my opinion, this is a key opportunity for cre8Buzz, and it is one that I would think should be more heavily emphasized with some concrete objectives. Like it or not, the big social sites are only going to keep getting bigger because of the HUGE opportunity to network and friend people. The opportunity seems to lie in the ability to give users something more than networking opportunities, and I think the Buzz does this in some ways through the Karma system and such. Why not expand this to being a primary focus of the site? Why not hold more contests for users around content? Why not “create Buzz” that gets people with good content career, sales or offline publicity opportunities? I’m thinking along the lines of Business Development strategies here in which revenue streams can be diversified: sponsorships, job boards, book deals, licensing, merchandising, and so on. Make the Buzz a place where members can promote content and make money, and in turn the Buzz can make money too.

5. Authenticity…again, I don’t understand what this really means. Personally, I believe that anything that becomes popular that is not authentic is weeded out and cut down by the masses in short order. Again, I’m just not sure where this is going.

Here are a few opportunities/questions that came to mind for me:

1. What is going to happen with the Buzz when portable profiles are the industry norm? Google and Yahoo, among others, are already working on this. The Open Social ID is just the first step in the process of a much larger movement to give people a profile package that can be plugged into every kind of site possible, with social networks probably leading the way. Recognizing this as a key opportunity up front might help to instill confidence in potential investors.

2. What is the significant market differentiator? I’m still not sure I know what it is, and I think that if it was readily apparent that there would be more members by now.

3. What are you doing to increase stickiness of the site? Is there a Chat function coming? What about an expanded Share function - for people to share good content with more than one friend at a time? Or a Stumble-like function to randomly browse through content based on certain search and/or rank criteria? You get the idea.

This is exactly the kind of feedback we were hopin’ for.

So what do you think? Is he right?