Ma.gnolia has a Budding Bus.ine.ss Mo.del

Ma.gnolia, a new social bookmarking site that I have blogged about before, is now live and open to new registrations. What I like about ma.gnoilia is how it goes beyond other sites in this category by coalescing distinct communities and interest groups like Flickr does. But there's much more.

The most interesting thing about Ma.gnolia is that - ta da - they already have a business model. They are actively courting marketers. Already you can see this business starting to bloom. Take a look at this page. Ma.gnolia has partnered with PETA, the EFF and even the Food Network to launch special collections of bookmarks. Now that's a smart idea.

As an interactive marketer, ma.gnolia really excites me. In this new world I see big opportunities for corporations to become not just content creators, but aggregators of stuff that's crafted by consumers. It's great that marketers can use ma.gnolia to create special collections, either as themselves or by sponsoring a personality to do so. Now let's hope the community fills in.

By the way, this isn't just a model for social bookmark sites. It's for memetrackers too. Hey Gabe, this is an idea for you. Memeorandum should partner with marketers to build co-branded memetrackers.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Bookmarks, ma.gnolia, memeorandum, Memetrackers, Memes, Social Computing, Social Media, Tagging, Tags

Comments

[Matt MacQueen]

Very interesting development. If a marketer wants to have a say in shaping or collecting the relevant topics/bookmarks on how they see their business - here is a place where a brand sponsorship could potentially make a lot of sense. (Provided they're not over-reaching their relevance of not just how they see themselves, but how the general public sees them too. For example Twinkies wouldn't be too credible if they sponsored a topic/community or bookmarks on "health food", but maybe Whole Foods could.) A lot of what I deal with as an agency guy is brands over-estimating just how elastic their brand benefits are in domains outside where they're actually credible.

Also something that's been on my mind a lot but has yet to be discussed much is the portability of one set of social bookmark links to others. As each new web 2.0 offering races each other for better features and more users (Flickr to Zooomr, del.icio.us to ma.gnolia, whatever replaces last.fm, etc.), I hope each new generation considers how to court or import tags and mappings from the tools that preceded them. I would argue the more open they are, the better.

But I'll bet the business leaders running those sites are more mercenary than my idealistic notion? Meaning, a THEM or US mentality, depending on their business model. Anyone have examples of friendly "importing" of those sites came before them?

The reason I ask is because some users invest so much work/time in social [insert function here] sites, and then a new, better one comes along and you've got yet another login, password, and screen name to consider and sort out among your 8-15 others. (Well, at least for alpha geeks like me and maybe some of your readers). I would be curious to know how many social bookmarking/news/music/photo sites the TYPICAL web-browsing person is a member of, and what the average # of logins customers will want to deal with is before old ones are abandoned, and new sites adopted in their place.

What are barriers to adoption of new sites like ma.gnolia, and how are their creators considering them? Important as we know we'll see many more sites evolving to swallow whoever else is the 'current leader' today. Because tomorrow they'll be yet another Web 2.0 app to spring up and try to replace it. I guess I should go stir the pot with this issue over on TechCrunch.. hah

Also Steve, always love your site but one user experience suggestion: when you put a big logo of a site such as the ma.gnoila one above, please consider making it link through to the site too (not just your text link in the paragraph). Same goes for your Joga.com graphic in the previous post... etc. :) Why not?

best,
Matt

[Ann Onymous]

This is exactly why I'll never use Magnolia - and I hope both they and other folks in the marketing community take note.

I'm delighted with delicious, and that's where I'll be staying. Not only does Magnolia's in-your-interface and feature set not give me any incentive to switch, but I have no reason to trust the things I see there. It's too commercial a presentation, in other words, while delicious (despite Joshua Schacter's comments in the past) is a genuine community of users.

Magnolia? No Thanks.

[Matt MacQueen]

"Ann" (nice),

In order to get adopted in mass users, Magnoila --or any other competitor to Delicious, now or a year from now-- will have to establish:

1) functionality and a UX demonstrably better than existing alternatives to be worth a switch,
-and-
2) trust, both explicit and implicit.

It remains to be seen if Magnolia will be able to develop either. I agree it's a steep uphill battle with regards to 'trust' when marketers enter the equation.

[Paul fabretti]

...a bit harsh Ann (!), but delicious is not necessarily the user friendly interface that would attract non-internet savvy individuals to click on sponsored links etc.
Maybe you may consider it selling out, but delicious has a place, so does magnolia - only magnolia does it in a friendlier way and actually puts some meat on the bones of delicious.

[Michael Betts]

If Magnolia is trying to position itself as different than delicious, then why are they completely copying the concept AND the style of the name? This reeks to me.

How about coming up with an original idea.