Earlier this year, Ning announced over 1 million social networks have been created on their platform. How much could one of those with 1,200 members sell for?
Lance Haun, and Laurie Ruettimann sold HRMToday, a niche social and blog network for the HR community. The final bid on ebay last night was $4,075. The auction received 1,928 hits, and the price jumped $1,500 during the final 10 minutes.
What’s next for the site? We’ll have to wait and see what the buyer has in mind. In the end, the sites future clearly depends on their communication, approach, and strategy. If the community is not engaged fairly quickly, it will be interesting to see their response. As Lance mentioned in a recent blog post, the site added 12 members this past week.
As sites, networks, and blogs continue to merge I would expect we’ll see more of this in the social networking space. Especially with groups on Ning given the communities and functionality of their platform.
Not at all surprising. I have seen a job board Ning network be sold for an undisclosed sum as well. It is not the platform that is the reason for these occurrences or in fact the prices, it is the content and Knowledge based of these sites.
Without the input and interaction of all social media platforms these sites are useless. Talent on View are educating corporate business’s on the importance of these social media platforms and actually establishing their own presence within their own sites. By creating your own social media platform you are taking full ownership and responsibility for all intellectual property and knowledge that transpires within your community. This is worth far more to a business then you can imagine.
Interesting move. With 1266 members (as of this morning) and a sale price of $4075, that works out to be just under $3.22 per member. I wonder how much per hour that works out to be for the time and effort Lance & Laurie put in to building and growing that network?
Let’s see, I currently have 1420 followers on Twitter…should I sell my user name (@getajob) for $4570? I don’t think so – even if Twitter’s Terms of Service agreement does allow the sale of profiles. Then again, that’s not even close to an apples-to-apples comparison either.
With a smaller social network like this, how much of the value is in the community and how much is with the founders/owners, the content they provide, etc.? Then there’s the matter of how it fits into a company’s overall strategy as well. As a standalone unit, this has a certain value, but as part of a greater whole, where it is able to effectively contribute to a company’s bottom line, it could very well have a much higher value indeed.
The implied trust of running a social network can be a powerful way for a company to maintain a (semi) captive audience, reduce customer acquisition costs, and position themselves to be seen as a trusted advisor rather than just someone trying to sell something. After all, if you don’t trust a social network on some level, you either wouldn’t join or wouldn’t be very active in it. Particularly for a niche social network such as this targeting a professional audience and building a community of professionals, the trust factor is higher than it would be for a network that targets essentially everyone.
I look forward to seeing how the HRM membership increases or decreases under the new ownership (I’m guessing it will increase from the publicity, at least in the short run), and, perhaps equally importantly, how the publicity around this increases Lance Haun’s and Laurie Ruettimann’s online presence. I don’t doubt that the “Your HR Guy” and “Punk Rock HR” brands will continue to attract more HR professionals.