The basic pitch is that you get shares for signing up and once the site is the new Facebook these nominal 0.01p shares will be worth £££’s (sigh).

Is me2everyone a scam?
Is it a clever viral campaign and, as it claims, destined to be the next big social network?
Is it a spam harvesting exercise?
Is it a waste of time?

Well one of my aims for this blog was to do the research into these things so you don’t have too… I signed up with one of my mail.com accounts (no addr book for it to spam, no real details) that I use for testing such things.

Alarm bell 1

Both invites I received were suspiciously similar – despite one being from a mid-30s business contact and the other a 20 year old musician contact.

And, sure enough once I’d logged in if offered me stock emails I could send to all my friends, like this one:

Recommending your friends, family, work colleaugues and even complete strangers is a great way to earn bonus shares. At the moment we are giving you 200 bonus shares for EVERYONE who you recommend using the link given above.

This is a real world value of GBP £0.20 today: but by 2012, we are forecasting these to be worth GBP £0.58! So imagine receiving GBP £116 for every new member you find!

Plus EVERYONE you recommend today will receive 100 shares for registering here for FREE. SImple…

Alarm bell 2

Perhaps I’m being a snob, but the site is distinctly amateur looking, apart from the intro video, the T+C’s are copy pasted from a £15 service i had come across before (website-law).

Alarm bell 3

The about us for the website lists an address in Kent that is distinctly residential – see here if you really want to (google map).

Any REAL “new facebook” would surely at least have a registered PO Box or… an office!

Alarm bell 4

Once registered ALL of the text reads like a run of the mill MLM scheme, talking about levels of membership and share options.

Remember the plan to close off recruiting at 300,000 members?

Well 10 minutes ago one of our Founder Members gave us the green light to keep the recruitment process open. This is wonderful news as we begin to expand towards the first half a million members. It also signals a change to the way we do business here:

1) Later today the first 40 Global Exec members will be named online

2) We also let you know the leaders in our “10 MILLION SHARE CHASE”

3) We will also give you a glimpse of the new Beta test pages… a chance to see where m2e will be very soon!

4) We are looking at the prospect of meeting with members to launch the Customer Care Manager team

5) News will be coming online a lot more frequently from today.
PLEASE READ THE NEXT STORY TO FIND OUT IMPORTANT CHANGES TO THE SHARE LEVELS

Alarm bell 5

NONE of what I’d call the big 5 tech blogs have written about it, its not (as of 2200 GMT 16th March) on Mashable, Wired, The Register, boingboing or TechCrunch.

Me2Everyone in Summary

A clever, mlm kind of social network scheme, most likely not malicious in intent but an idea that plays on all the usual tricks of “get rich quick” type schemes, hell its the oldest chain email in the book! “Send this email to all your friends and you’ll get £100 from Bill Gates” – and those earned people… how much money again?

I call scam – avoid it.

Part of the value in Twitter for a user is the ability to communicate with a wider circle of influence than you might otherwise of been able, as the masses join twitter the danger is that the noise to signal ratio increases making it less useful – but what if they’d started charging when they hit a certain number of users?

Would it start to make some real money that so far it has only hinted at being able to earn? Would people of left the service for another? Certainly charging existing users, would create a mass exodus… but some of the attraction for early adopters is the exclusive club feel – that would be, in some ways, amplified.

This is a very hypothetical post btw – it came from being asked why twitter was anything more than “the next big thing” – in their words, “it was all about friends reunited, then myspace, then facebook… now everyones joining twitter – its just another fad, I’m not signing up”.

That conversation led me to the thought above and also to wonder, what’s the next big thing?

What if twitter IS just a fad?

Some people lose a lot of money, the cool kids move on, the spammers and randomness takes over – this is based on what some people would perceive happened to myspace as a platform, although I would argue its reverted back to its “native” state of being a good place for bands/musicians/DJs/performers.

So what do you think?

Is it a fad?

If so, what’s next?

In total my update went out to around 750 people across three platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) – through a status message I sent out a simple request for people to get in touch.

I’d hoped for 10 or so, during the day…

…within 30 minutes I had 30 replies.

Wow.

THAT is the power of the network, to be able to broadcast out a simple message – in this case on twitter, which automatically updated my Facebook status (would be nice if LinkedIn status could be done via twitter too – hint hint, any techy friends listening?) and get 30 replies in 30 minutes.

An hour later, I was visiting an office space with a friend/business partner of mine which we’ll likely rent together and I have plenty of likely candidates.

In further evidence of the power of the network: I noticed a business contact had changed their LinkedIn status to mention they were working on a particular project… which I was writing an article about for here (to be published later in the week – when its finished) a quick email exchange later and a meeting is set up so we can collaborate.

Within 2hrs my network has provided:

A good group of potential employees
A business partnership
and Office space

My “Springers final thought for the day” – courtesy of GrindVision:

the most successful people are great networkers and in in this day and age the most successful businesses are great at social media

I couldn’t agree more.

That is 2% of the worlds population.

Think about that for a minute, if you take out those who dont use or have access to the internet – thats a high percentage of people.

We’ve decided to conduct a simple survey of 100 people who work in businesses around our area – how many use social networking, how many have a business strategy for it… now that’s something else to think about!

As soon as we’ve completed and compiled our survey, we’ll publish it here.

I’ve been really inspired by the reaction to this talk, both in person and the webinar version I presented a couple of weeks ago.

What’s in the talk?

I cover all aspects of the social web from a business perspective.

The Social Web in 10 Slides

Why Social Networking matters
Overview of the main players
Taking the social out of social networking
Usage and Users
Monetizing the Social Web
Case study
Interest is not Intent
Do’s n Don’ts
Corporate and Policy considerations
The future of the Social Graph

BONUS

Social Bookmarking – delivering traffic through the social web.

It’s an Intergage client seminar (free if you’re an Intergage client) at the Burley Manor Hotel, there are limited places available to paying attendees – to request a place on the seminar, please use this booking form.

If you’d be interested in me presenting this to your company or business group, please contact me for more details.

At first glance, it’s another social network aimed at business users, mainly US focused and with a rating system within your network.

On sign up, as well as the usual invite your friends/contatcs through email address books, it also allows you to give them your LinkedIn or Plaxo details to invite your contacts – interesting – all the usual stuff is there, describe yourself, upgrade to premium to add these extra bits (ie linking to a personal domain).

Usage wise it all looks n feels, ok, nothing groundbreaking – the amount and positioning of Ads on the site is perhaps a bit excessive (too large and in the middle of the page – making some bit feel cluttered).

They’re slightly different to the usual networking sites though in that their main up-sell is “reputational repair” – confused?

If you search for your name on google and you don’t like the results, they’ll do their best to “repair” that reputation for you, to quote from their own site: 

“I had a securities violation that was over 20 years old that kept coming to the top of Google for my name. Naymz was able to put a flood of positive information on the web about me that pushed down my old mistake.”

Michael P. – Financial Advisor

Now there are 2 things here that worry me:

1) They’ve set up their site in contrast to Google’s own guidance on best practice.  The content of the website is not designed for a human visitor, it includes an A-Z type link chunk on each page as a way of trying to bolster its rankings for each name, click on one of those and you get an even uglier chunk of names, again purely for the Google spider. This probably works well, but note that Google could take a dim view on this and blacklist the site.

2) They will “flood” the Internet with positive information about you – there’s something that is almost (and for want of a better word) unethical about this. Surely knowing that a Financial Advisor had a Securities Violation in their history is something I should find? If he had other information on there to balance the search then this wouldn’t be such an issue.  Flooding the world with my information, isn’t something I’d want a company to do.

Perhaps I’m missing a trick here, maybe there is more to Naymz than being just A.N.Other social networking site with an up-sell to “reputational repair” for people who don’t have much online presence… what do you think?

Please add your comment below.

The key for me in the end was simple- I loaded up another browser (Flock, lovely for social networking addicts), and transfered everything personal onto that, all my bookmarks, my email, my social networking logins, all my RSS feeds (so many blogs so little time).  I then crafted my orignial browser into a work powerhouse- I sorted out all my bookmarks, loaded up work-related RSS feeds and spent some time just getting the browser to feel like I was “at work”.  And equally, my Flock browser has no end of stupid add-ons, fun stuff and time wasting opportunities.  The simple act of doing this, and loading up the work browser during work time, and the social browser during out of work time has seen my productivity rocket.  In fact I would go so far as to say that I spend less time on social networking than I did when I was employed by someone else.  It’s gone a long way to separate work and play and has made me far less stressed in the process.  It’s worked so well that i’ve done the same on my laptop, and have even used Foxmarks to synch my bookmarks for both browsers across each machine.  Now, wherever I am, if I feel the need to chill out, I close work and open play.  It’s clear to my mind that this is non-worktime, so I’m so much more inclined after a few minutes so log out, close Flock and load up work.

Simple but effective!

An interesting question, in this instance myspace was probably the offering is music/arts related… it led me to think further… I’ve tried LOTS of social networks and I get asked this quite often – maybe its something I should do on here?

Would you be interested in “reviews” (for want of a better word!) of social networking sites?

Answers on a comment below.

The Social Web in 10 Slides

1. Why Social Networking matters
2. Overview of the main players
3. Taking the social out of social networking
4. Usage and Users 
5. Monetizing the Social Web 
6. Case study 
7. Interest is not Intent 
8. Do’s n Don’ts
9. Corporate and Policy considerations 
10. The future of the Social Graph 

BONUS

   11. Social Bookmarking – delivering traffic through the social web

I’m also delivering a version of this at an upcoming Intergage client seminar in November.

If you’d be interested in me presenting this to your organisation, (or other related topics) please contact me at Intergage on 0845 456 1022.

Each user has a page, with information about themselves that they can customise. When you find a friend, colleague or associate on the same site (at first you will often only see a basic summary of their detaisl) you can request to “add” them as a friend, once they accept you can see their full details.

The current leaders in the social networking field are facebook and myspace – largely similar in the way they allow users to share photos and video, leave messages and interact through online games and applications.

More importantly, sites like plaxo and LinkedIn are good business equivalants to these sites, allowing business people to connect and network on a global scale – they are largely still reffered to as “Social Networking” as the method they use is very similar.

LinkedIn allows you to make reccomendations that are visible on someones page and to see who they are connected to, to facilitate an introduction.

Please note – we will be frequently expanding this article as the technology grows.