So here you are. You have a company. You have some customers, quite a lot of them in fact, and some of them are loyal, very loyal. And now you’re thinking it might be a good idea to get some sort of online social network going to take advantage of the situation. This seems like a natural progression of all your other marketing strategies and a good idea, and everyone is doing it so it must be right, right?

Yes it might be, but it might also be very wrong, and it might end up hurting your business and your brand much more than it will do it any good.

I suggest, before you rush off and start something that can’t be undone, that you need to take a long hard look at what kind of company you have and how that kind of company should approach operating online, and particularly how you should approach starting a niche social network online.
 
Start off with motivation. What business needs do you want to meet by starting a social network?

If your answer is “that you simply want to take advantage of a large and loyal customer base to increase profits by being able to reach them whenever and wherever and mine their behaviour and data input, for ever more targeted offline marketing” (phew), I suggest no.
 
However, if your answer is something along the lines of “you would like to find new ways of making life easier for your customers and help them tell you what they think you can improve”, then I say yes.

The main point here should be fairly clear: Doing social networking, or any other kind of social media based service for your customers, must start with the needs of, exactly, your customers. Just like the product you started selling in the first place was something that made someone’s life that much better or more enjoyable, your company’s social networking or social media efforts must add real value to the customer. Think of it as extending your product range, not cheapening it.

When the issue of motivation has been dealt with you should start looking at the actual make-up of your customer base, and when you have a good idea of who they are, start thinking about what they would like to do/what they would like to learn about/what they would potentially find useful or just plain entertaining or what would potentially make them feel good about themselves.
 
Here there are mainly two strands of behaviour and need that will emerge, one more hardcore utilitarian (“as a group, find me a post-office near my house”), the other more soft and identity based (“I would love to do this so that my peers can see how clever I am”).

The research you do will place your customers’ needs and behaviour somewhere between and along the graph straddling these two main axes. This graphic illustrates my point, I hope.

So when, after some very hard social media soul searching, you still want to go ahead and build your very own niche social network, make sure you tape your version of the above graph close to or perhaps on top of your screen, and build your solution so that it meets the needs of your customers. Without doing so chances are you will create something no one will ever use.