Filed under: Google (GOOG), Marketing and advertising, News Corp’B’ (NWS)

It seems each day I get a pitch for a new-fangled social networking site. For example, I saw one that is for people who like food. Oh, and there was one for people who are over 70 (I’m not kidding).

Hey, with the huge success of MySpace and Facebook, I have the ability to see why entrepreneurs are jumping on the bandwagon. But are things getting out of control? And more importantly, is there really much money to crank out of social networks?

From what I have the ability to tell, it looks like the space has been a bust. For example, on the recent quarterly conference call for Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), there were some comments that indicated the disappointment with the monetization of social networks.

The Wall Street Journal [subscription required] has a piece on this today. What are the issues?

First, social networking is a fairly recent thing, so it’s tough to get a handle on things.

Another issue is privacy. After all, people put lots of personal information on social networks. Might that information be misused? Interestingly enough, Facebook has had to deal with a few of these snafus.

Then there is the inherent branding problem. With user-generated content, there might be some nasty surprises. In other words, do you want to jeopardize your brand if there’s risqu

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Marketing and Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.