There is a mad rush towards online social networking space. Every second person wants to get on the bandwagon with his own social networking website with a silly-sounding name. In my opinion, most of these sites are just a fad and are not built on strong fundamentals in terms of a) revenue sources and b) the problem they solve.

What is online networking, btw?

The purpose of a social networking website is to help you keep in touch with your existing contacts and to generate more contacts! In case of social networking, the contacts are friends or prospective friends, whereas In case of business networking, the contacts are business associates or prospective business associates.

Now, answer this question - How much time and money are you willing you spend to keep in touch with your: a) friends and b) business associates. It is important to know this fact. Online market may be different, but it is closely related to offline consumer behaviour. Online business model can help in extending the product composition with new innovation and format of delivery. It is important to know if people are willing to pay for a given convinience. And if they are not willing to pay for the convinience, what alternate source of revenue do we have?

So how do you keep in touch with your friends?

In real life, you spend nothing to keep in touch with your friends. You call them up when you want to hang out with them, you give them a shout on their mobile phones or drop in to kill some time! If you are tech-savvy and love to announce a great news, you send them emails. Why will you like to send a scrap to someone (when you can simply send a short email or catch up on various instant messengers)? And why will you like to create such huge volume of personal content and share with millions of people on the Internet who are not even known to me.

Though you may have build friendship /relationship on social networking websites, they are generally not for long. And the long ones actually use the social networking as only the contact point and then evolves and flourishes offline.

What about business associates?

However, business networking sites will keep evolving, since it adds value to businesses. It help people refer / recommend a vendor or buyer to other people in a networked environment as a recommendation network. It has been very successful, when it comes to executive search and generating new business.

Again, the formal nature of relationship and privicy factor makes business networking websites a great place to get connected and exchange notes.

So, the conclusion is:

So, as on today, given the trend, I can say that social networking is a fad, which is getting saturated and is not supported by a proper revenue model. Online advertising cannot be considered a decent revenue model for a site where people come to kill time! However business networking is here to stay. Corporate intranets having social communities may stay. 

I have already written the orbituary of Facebook, My Space, Bebo and social networking platforms. These are evolving as a fad and will vapourize in the same way in years to come. I wish these trillion dollar valuations to be true, but my mind says otherwise. And I am not the only person saying this. Steve Rubel of Micro Persuation feels the same way to a great extent (may be for different reasons).

What do you think? 

Among all the social-business networking sites, I find Ecademy and LinkedIn to be the best ones. Ecademy is my favorite since it has very nicely integrated offline networking in its system which results in creating trusted networks.

I experienced a very nice group-problem-solving technique called Virtual Tables during an offline networking event organized by Ecademy. I found it to be very effective. It can be extremely beneficial if practiced in a trusted network.

What you need:

• People who are interested in helping each other
• Ninety minutes (1 1/2 hour) 
• Paper / Pen to take notes

This is how it works:

Group together

It works best in a group of six-seven participants. If there are many more members, they should arrange themselves in group of six participants. I feel that it works best when the group is of people from diversified field (different businesses, departments, etc.). I think (not yet tested) that it will work best if people with same kind of responsibilities participate together (all business owners, all managers, all programmers, etc.).

All participants sit around a table. Every participant has 12-15 minutes by turn.

Now its your turn

When your turn comes, you can table your problem. Generally people table their biggest concern, dilemma, situation, issue they are facing in few minutes. The other participants of your group come up with their own solutions, point-of-views and ideas to help you. Since different people come from different backgrounds and have different ways to solve a problem, it is amazing to see how many fantastic ideas pops up. These sessions are generally filled with why-i-did-not-think-of-this-before sighs. This collective brainstorming delivers a list of suggestions that are diverse in nature and gives a new approach to solve the same problem.

It is like having five consultants serving you for fifteen minutes with their subject matter knowledge and common sense with an honest intention coming from an absolutely independent chair to help you out!

Take notes & rotate

You should take notes of the ideas. I suggest you note down all the ideas and spend some time back home thinking over them and considering the solutions offered by different people on the table. For the time being, you shall rotate the strike and the next guy should now table his/her problem and you should become a part of the elite panel of consultants who will help bail him/her out!

An important note:

It is utmost importance to maintain the privacy and confidentiality of the discussion. The purpose of the virtual tables is to help and get help. It may take time for members to trust each other, but once a trust network is formed, the effectiveness just multiplies and it keeps growing with the speed of trust.

So, go out and try this to discover a stress-free way of solving your problems (and others’ too)!

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