Finding the Next Facebook

When the Internet emerged on a global scale in the late 1990s, some saw it as a tool that would transform how we live and work forever, while others viewed it simply as a fad that would vanish in time. Years later, social media has followed the same path. Despite early skeptics, both the Internet and social media are clearly here to stay. For many people, social media, like the Internet, is now deeply integrated into daily life. The enormous popularity of sites like Facebook and Twitter prove that social media is much more than a passing fad. In fact, Gartner predicts that social media revenue will reach $34 billion by 2016, up from $11.8 billion in 2011.

The question now is, what comes next for social media? The following are five up-and-coming social media sites and applications that government should pay attention to in 2013 and beyond.

Nextdoor is a private social network designed to let neighbors connect and restore a sense of community to neighborhoods. Co-founder Sarah Leary said 28 percent of Americans don’t know any of their neighbors by name. To fill that communications gap, Nextdoor provides an online place for community interaction about useful information. This isn’t another social network for photo sharing or posting updates about vacation plans. Instead it aims to be an online hub for spreading the word about a break-in, organizing a garage sale or getting recommendations about local businesses.

Nextdoor limits the number of potential users in each network to a neighborhood’s boundaries, so that a user can connect with his or her neighbors — and only with his or her neighbors. It was beta tested for a year in a variety of neighborhoods, and now reaches more than 6,400 neighborhoods in 49 states. The social media site also verifies that the people connecting through it really are neighbors. The address of each user is confirmed to build confidence among users that they are creating connections within their community.

Nearly 1 million viewers watched the mayor’s press conferences on YouTube, more than 3.5 million people visited NYC.gov, and more than 325,000 visited the city’s Facebook page. Still, Haot says a broad social media strategy isn’t for everyone. “We try to discourage social media use by agencies that want to be there solely for the purpose of being there. The best way to approach that decision is to consider what you are trying to achieve, who you are you trying to reach, and where they ‘live’ online. We probably spent as much time pushing back on ideas we didn’t think would work as we did moving forward with ideas we did think would work.”

And local governments can get in on the action. Government representatives, like city managers and police officers, can use Nextdoor to connect with users and post information for them. However, they can’t see the rest of the conversation, including profile pages or the member directory. “They can simply broadcast into the neighborhood,” Leary said. Then it’s up to the users if they wish to contact the government representative for more information or to comment on the post.

“Local governments see this as a way to improve their reach and expand the number of people who are participating in a conversation to make the community better,” Leary said.

Chime.in makes it easy to connect people who have similar interests. According to the site, it’s “the place to find incredible content about whatever you’re into and other people who are just as passionate about it as you are.”

 Launched in October 2011, Chime.in lets people share opinions, questions, interests, hobbies, etc. Unlike most social networks, Chime.in is organized around subjects instead of people and does not have the typical status updates. Instead, it has “chimes.”

Chimes are a cross between a Facebook status update and a blog post. They can be about any topic. Together, the Chimes make up topic-based discussions that can include links, videos, polls and photos.

Booker recently pitched #waywire at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 conference in San Francisco. “There are these huge utilities in the social sphere that are very powerful and we all rely on — Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter,” Booker said. “The key is not to try to create a product that’s going to muscle them out of the way. What we wanted to do is very elegantly lay [sic] on top of these platforms to use people’s existing social networks to give them a richer experience on the Web that better helps them to discover content, that better helps them share it to their friends, and when they feel passionate, when something really matters to them, for them to actually lay it on that and contribute to that.”

This new social platform is moving forward with the mindset that video is the future of communicating, and it’s been described as a more socially conscious YouTube.

Traditionally social media has played a supporting role in the hiring process, by helping managers run identity checks and do the requisite due diligence on prospective candidates, for example. But some hiring-related social media startups like Antezen are gaining ground on more traditional job seeker portals by building their own referral networks using social media platforms. Such sites help pinpoint the right candidate for a job and may prompt a wave of change in corporate hiring.

Antezen is designing apps to bring like-minded professionals and businesspeople together. One app determines who a user likes to work with as well as who those people like to work with. It mines the data available about professionals on LinkedIn and arrives at a score, called a mutual affinity factor, indicating how much the user and people they don’t yet know might enjoy doing business together. Once enough data is collected, it can also suggest jobs for users based on who it predicts they would enjoy working with. Why is this important? Antezen CEO Shashank Shekhar said about half of employees leave a job within the first 18 months of starting it, not because they don’t have the right skill set but because of factors like disliking the work environment or not getting along with their boss. “All of the effort that goes into finding the right skill set, 42 percent of the time it ends up being a waste,” he said.

Another Antezen app, a skills matching engine, allows for more advanced searches pertaining to job descriptions. “The problem with today’s search engines is that a very typical job description says, ‘I want an expert in Java who has a little bit of familiarity with some other language,’ but none of the search engines today support a search like that,” Shekhar said. Antezen’s program will permit those advanced searches of resumés and is being tested by customers in India, he said.

The combination of the mutual affinity factor and skills matching engine could help provide a complete hiring solution, Shekhar said. They will determine not only who is the most qualified for a job, but also how much they are likely to mesh with future co-workers.

 In less than a year of operations, some of these startups (others include Round One and HireRabbit) have signed on dozens of corporate clients and are testing applications with companies across the globe.

One trend likely to continue in 2013 is using social media to inspire people to get involved in community life. Ning is a platform that allows people and organizations to create custom social networks. It was designed to let users weave social conversations into content and inspire action. Though it’s not new (Ning was founded in 2004), its use is on the rise, particularly for nonprofit organizations looking to spread the word about their respective causes. Ning integrates with other social platforms like Facebook and Twitter to help maximize its reach and audience.

For example, Keep Britain Tidy, an environmental charity and the anti-litter campaign for England, recently launched a Ning forum where people can turn conversation and debates into action, help change people’s habits nationally and organize local litter pickups. In addition, the government employee networking site GovLoop runs off Ning and provides chat functionality, blog posting and forums.

For governments or agencies that have a large workforce, Ning could be a way to update internal forums and increase collaboration among employees. It also can be used to encourage engagement among government stakeholders. While serving as Virginia’s secretary of technology, Aneesh Chopra used Ning to create a social network to connect health-care providers in the state and provide a way for them to share best practices.