blog.msurveys.com

TechCrunch has a post called "The New Focus Group", mentioning two companies offering "white-label social networks to consumer research": Mzinga and Networked Insights. These offerings let "companies create a place on their sites where customers can hang out and talk about their products".

While this sounds interesting in some ways, I do wonder how many brands out there would have a chance in hell of carrying this off. Perhaps I'm the only one feeling a certain social networking ennui - but I certainly would much rather engage with brands in my existing social networking context (if I felt like engaging with brands at all), rather than joining yet another site somewhere.

Now that pretty much all the social networking sites are starting to open up to outside content (see Facebook apps and OpenSocial), I do wonder why not more people are looking at taking advantage of existing social networks, rather than providing the tools for creating custom ones. While this is technically not too difficult, I think it's not easy to create a "community" top-down, so I do have my reservations about these kinds of corporate-driven "let's create a social network around our brand" efforts. I just can't see average people flocking to these places just for the benefit of "talking about a brand's product". Embedding this kind of community inside my existing social network surely has a much better chance of succeeding?