New Book: The Social Network Business Plan by David Silver

Anyone who has a social network or is attempting to improve it or start a new online community will benefit from David Silver's new book "The Social Network Business Plan: 18 Strategies That Will Create Great Wealth."

Don't be turned off by the title. This is not a book about technology. Instead it deals with the issues and challenges that need to be addressed to build and maintain successful online social networks from the perspective of an investor. Wealth is broadly defined here not only in monetary terms, but in providing benefits to the users in a community by helping companies and government to provide better products and services.

My Review from the Trenches
My review is through the lens of someone who is trying mightily to build an online home remodeling community using Drupal. Besides maintaining the site, I spend time thinking about ways to grow the community and produce content. Since time is precious I am always trying to learn more about social networks at the least cost. David Silver's book helped a lot.

My review reflects what I found valuable and how best to mine the advice the book. The Social Network Business Plan: 18 Strategies That Will Create Great Wealth is available at Amazon.com. I am donating to the Drupal Association 100 percent any revenue from my Amazon Associate's account that deals with sales of this new book.

How to Read this Book
First read the book from cover to cover. It's especially important not to skip the Introduction. I did and I was totally lost in Chapter 1. The introduction spells out the author’s philosophy and defines important concepts like "recommender websites” and communities.

David also defines "wealth" from not only his perspective as an investor. The former might trouble many folks who run or are contemplating building a non-profit online community. Don't let it bother you. The reality is that we all have to make a living and the expertise and effort to create value and benefits for the members of our community takes some money.

The book also explains another aspect of "wealth." This is explained in terms of what benefits he expects online community members to receive besides fellowship and social interaction. I found this compelling and especially relevant to why many of us are so interested in social networks. In my case it is to reduce and ultimately eliminate the pain from remodeling and decorating.

What's Good about the Book
The books approach to launching and sustaining social networks is to get away from the advertising model that so many social networks use today. Think Facebook and MySpace and perhaps your own community if you use Google Adsense. When I came across this passage, alarm bells sounded since I use Adsense on my site. Of course the 18 ways of generating revenue recommended in the book offered some alternatives and food for thought, but they take a lot more work than using Adsense. Social network sites, my own included, need to diversity their revenue streams to grow.

The most important aspect of the book deals with user generated content. David advocates "slicing and dicing" anonymous user content that discusses products and services and creating reports for industry, companies and government. His reasoning appears sound, since most companies would prefer dealing with a specialized community than just advertising to the masses. Personally I don't see any harm in this as long as users are told up front that this will be done and how they would share in the benefits. Some of the communities discussed in the book do this.

Chapter 4 is an important chapter. It provides three great examples of online communities that are relatively successful and are using many of the strategies David is advocating. These companies include:

• Sermo.com a community for physicians to discuss real live cases and other issues of concern with their colleagues.
• Patientslikeme.com- a community that helps people deal with serious illnesses.
• Hystersisters.com- a women only community for those who have had a hysterectomy or are contemplating one.

Being able to explore these websites will be invaluable. It will allow you to visualize how the strategies could be employed in your community.

The book also provides examples of social networking sites that could be started. This might be good to jump start your brainstorming sessions if you are looking for ideas. I addition, the book provides proforma incomes statements that go with the communities. The financial statements give you a feel for what it takes in terms of effort and money to grow a community. Although the numbers should not be taken literally, you can get an idea of where your effort should be directed and what an investor's expectations might be.

What's the book lacks
The book assumes from the start that you can get people to sign up as members and that there's a need for the community to begin with. It is short on specifics on how to go about this, so you will have to look elsewhere for this material. However, it assumes a great deal of effort in these areas specifically for SEO, membership recruitment, etc. The proforma incomes statements will give you and idea of how this is budgeted for.

The book doe not dwell on social networking software either. It references commercial software offerings like Ning and Onesite. That's a result of David's inexperience with web stuff and the open source community, which he readily admits to. I am working on educating him about Drupal's capabilities so I expect that in his next book, he will acknowledge Drupal.

There are times when the book departs from it's central message of abandoning all advertising and relying on user-created content. It also assumes that people will pay a nominal fee to become members. This is definitely not my experience so far.

If you need books on social networking that are more technically oriented and deal with using Drupal, then look no further than the Ultimate Community Site Guide by Dorien Herremans (see http://drupal.org/node/367131 and Drupal 6 Social Networking by Michael Peacock (see http://drupal.org/node/344141 ).

Conclusion
A good book to really get your arms around what you should be doing on the non-technical side to improve or start your social networking site.