The Zoints profile system and community based social network

[elboriyorker]

The Zoints profile system and community based social network

Community forums that want to be part of the network, give it a try and post a comment of what you think.

Have you ever thought about how many new members your community could get if it was featured prominently across MySpace? Or how much money you could make if your own ads ran on MySpace? MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, etc; they've all become HUGE sites because the Internet has taken a turn towards the social application. That's why you hear so much about "Web 2.0".

MSN Spaces, Google Pages, Orkut, Yahoo 360, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Tagworld, and on and on. ALL the big boys are getting involved in social networks and communities. Just look at what Google and Nike are doing on Joga.com; soccer today, your community niche tomorrow? And if your community is like most, only about 10% of your total member base is active. That's not good; online communities are losing their "stickiness".

What type of system would help online communities the most in the long run? How could we increase the "stickiness" of online communities? How could we create an efficient means for members to navigate between the multiple communities they are members of? These very questions were debated at length and we came up with some novel ideas. Some of the biggest names in forum programming have come together to create a social network and profile system designed to benefit online communities in every way imaginable. The code that will release will allow you to tap into this social network. And then when a member's profile on your community is clicked on, it takes them to the member's personal space on the social network. Rather than hundreds or thousands of small, segmented forum profile systems across the net, forums will tap into one large one that will be more apt to reach a Tipping Point and benefit community owners much more in the long run.

Let's say you operate a community dedicated to video games. If your members really like your community, they have probably already invited all of their friends who like video games to join your site. However, each of your members has many more friends who are NOT that interested in video games (lets say they all prefer sports) that they want to keep in contact with via a social network. Therefore, they'll still end up using those other social networks like MySpace "because my friends are". However, with our system, they can invite all of their friends to join their network and keep in contact, you get advertising impressions (I'll talk revenue sharing later) on their friends' profiles, and those friends then go and join a sports community that uses this system. That sports community does the same thing, and the friends of the sports enthusiasts who prefer video games end up joining YOUR site. Everyone benefits!

How does this social network benefit communities?

Since day one, we set out to design a system that would help ensure that communities continue to flourish in this changing social and technological landscape. Take a step back and think about it. What is going to benefit you more in the long run? Enhanced profiles on your community so your forum members can continue to interact with those they know? Or an incredibly advanced profile system and social network where your members will build profiles that have the potential to not only help drive traffic to your community, but generate revenue for you?

Revenue Sharing

As stated above, this will be a revenue sharing system. By simply entering your Google Adsense publisher ID into our system, you will automatically receive a percentage of impressions on the profiles of the members from your forum. In addition, you will receive impressions on the profiles of members your members subsequently refer. For example, if you refer 25 members who each refer 10 friends, you will receive ad impressions on 250 different profiles. After less than one day of using this system, the top forum has received 896 impressions as of this writing. As the social network grows, this could potentially be a significant new revenue stream for community owners.

New Members

We will do everything in our power to send additional members to your community. Below is a flowchart depicting anticipated member flow for the initial rollout:



The social network will generate traffic for you in a variety of ways:

1. Any community that joins will have a place in our browseable/searchable directory. MySpace has groups, we have communities. People who utilize the profile system will be able to find communities that interest them.

2. We will be advertising the directory AGGRESSIVELY.

3. When a member links their forum profile to our system, a link to your community is automatically placed in their profile in a communities block. People browsing their profile will naturally click through (these are also great for SEO by the way).

4. Of all our means to drive new members to your communities, I'm most excited about our tagging system. When your forum joins, you will create a list of "tags" (or keywords) that describe what your community is about. For example, if you run a music site, you would obviously enter "music" as one of your tags. On member profiles, they have two blocks. "Interests" and "Network Interests". The interests block allows members to enter tags that describe their specific interests. And the network interests block is a collection of the interests of people in their personal social network. When one of those interests are clicked on, a page comes up that shows other people who share that same interest as well as communities that are tagged with that interest. So if someone clicks on a "music" interest tag and your forum is about music, a link to your forum comes up. This is the ultimate in targetted traffic.

5. Taking the interest tagging one step further, we will on occasion send automated PM's to members (they can opt out of these with a simple click) that matches them to communities by the interests they have entered. For example, "Hello [Zoints]DChapman, we see that you are interested in music. You should take a look at [forum name], a music site [your directory description]".

We have many more ideas for driving traffic to your sites. As time progresses, we'll continue to improve and refine the entire system.

Conclusion

Will this system be the best solution for every community out there? Unfortunately it will not, and I sincerely apologize if we have disappointed you. However, those who do realize the potential of this system and the need to adapt to the evolving Internet: we make the promise that we will strive to help take your community to a whole new level. These are exciting times, and we look forward to working with you :)

I wanted to thank The Sandman for being kind enough to showcase the Zoints system here at TAZ. You're a true gentlemen, sir.