Last week I spoke at the launch of Squiz’ new Open Source Social Networking Platform about the business and cultural implications of social networking for publishers.
The event was held at the Royal Society of Arts and it was interesting to see such a wide range of different types of publishers in the room. There were conventional content publishers, both magazine and on-line, but there were also charities, universities, the RSA themselves and several companies who publish to employees via their intranets.
Social networks and publishing are converging
I believe we’re now seeing a big convergence of platform functionality between the social networking sites and traditional publishers. After starting out as a pure social network, Facebook is introducing more and more ways for users to upload and share content. It started out with the wall and now includes groups, photo uploads and many others. LinkedIn is doing similar things with groups and discussions.
Social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn start from the premise that you already know the people and are therefore going to be interested in the content they are creating. It’s like going to the pub with your mates and having a gossip.
Publishers understand their audiences
Publishers on the other hand come at social networking from a completely different perspective. Publishers audiences are bound by a common interest. Whether that’s the arts, technology, sewing or pregnancy, they consume the publishers content because they are interested in the subject matter.
Some groups are only interested in a transient way, pregnancy communities are, by definition, constantly changing. Others are more permanent, if you are an Arsenal supporter then it’s for life! The common theme though is that the community is drawn together by the content and consists of people that share a common interest but don’t necessarily know each other (at first). It’s much more like a club than a pub.
CMS is evolving
The underlying concepts for social networking (and the requisite technology platform) though are the same. It’s about connecting people to content and then back to people again to form connections and community.
Squiz along with some of the more enlightened CMS developers are now building this functionality into the CMS platforms and the launch was very well received. Publishers seem finally to be getting to grips with the concepts and now have the tools to allow them to engage properly with their audiences.
Culture is the key
The biggest barrier is no longer the technology, it’s the culture and willingness to “let go” of the traditional one way broadcast model of publishing and start listening to what the audience have to say.
It takes time to create vibrant communities. Publishers have to take responsibility for creating the right environment and nurturing the firestarters that will generate the user content. You can’t just bolt community on to the side of your existing publishing business, culturally or technically. You have to integrate it into the fabric of your organisation.
Content will always provide a “centre of gravity” for communities that pure social networks will find hard to replicate. That gives publishers a big opportunity to provide the platform for their communities to engage with them and each other.
I attended the first day of the 
