Many community groups already know they need to set up places where their ‘clients’ can share experiences with others who really understand. But sometimes they don’t so much need to set up venues as to locate existing possibilities and establish a presence or provide the links.

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick has an article about niche social networks, triggered by the appearance of SoberCircle. He begins his article, The Nearly Never Ending Market for Niche Social Networks, with a nice, clear explanation:

What is a social network? Typically, it’s just a website that offers users a profile page, the ability to publish to the web, to add other users as friends and to send user-to-user messages, or sitemail. That’s simple but powerful stuff;

Then he goes on to make several points, including this fundamental observation:

People will share information with groups of people they know they can relate to that they never would share in a general public forum. We all seek empathy and many of us have life experiences that cannot be meaningfully discussed outside of a context of shared understanding and a base of common experience. People in recovery from substance abuse is one such huge market, people with communicable diseases another, the insanely wealthy yet another - and the list goes on.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Share this post

Hide Sites