Social Network Profiling - The Weight Loss Chapter

When addressing Social Networks, most users consider the most “generic” ones such as MySpace, Facebook or Hi5. Although with different functionalities and approaches, the main focus of these Social Networks is the building of a friend database with multimedia elements – photos, videos, etc… But, besides these, there are Social Networks that actually serve a purpose besides satisfying some areas of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – they are directed towards a common trait or goal that members of that particular website share and go one step ahead of “generic”. In the various examples I could mention, I decided that one that would be interesting is a Weight Loss SNW.
Why Weight Loss above all? Well, not only am I obsessed about losing weight, so is 90% of the population of the modern world. Maybe it’s an over estimation, but losing weight is a main issue to anyone who owns a mirror and has any contact with fashion advertising. Being an age old issue, a Weight Loss SNW would appeal at a first level as s a way for people facing this task to gather and share experience. But it has gone beyond and created various tools for tracking and comparing weight loss results, thus creating a stronger sense of community. The example that comes to mind would be SparkPeople. At a first glance, this website might appear to be a Weight Loss Resource Center, but it goes far beyond it. It allows users to track what they eat, how much exercise they do, how they should reward themselves, amongst other functionalities that turn the weight loss effort into a semi-professional sport. Not only that, but it allows users to create their own user page and weight tracker to show other users their evolution.
The board where they post their information is a run-of-the-mill forum, but divided into logical categories with different expectations of answering time – from the Panic Area, where people who commit a sin immediately confess to the Male Lounge, where men concerned with weight loss issues are free to complain about that extra pound. Besides this, there are users who belong to SparkPeople itself, like coaches and teachers, who take the time to answer to the issues that are placed in the Board, thus providing an adequate feedback to many of the questions that can approach simple weight loss doubts to complex negative feeling concerning body appearance.
Another example I can mention would be Weight Watchers – but I’d rather not. For one, Weight Watchers is a Brand by itself so the Site is very Brand oriented. It cannot be considered a SNW as the main component is not the member only functionalities and community interaction, but it works more like a Resource Center. So, it serves different purposes, as well as the trust it gains from users differs - Sparkpeople is People-oriented as it isn’t explicitly connect to an offline Brand, whereas Weight Watchers has the recognition of the offline World, which doesn’t necessarily mean the recognition of the online crowd.

OK, so a good question – if you do not want to lose weight, why would you care about the existence of this website? Quite simply because Social Networking is the big fad – specially for Brands who want to get into the Hype. But most of them want to create a “community” – without doing an actual filter of the types of contents as they do not want to limit the user’s interactions. But sometimes, filtering the nature of the SNW functionalities the Brand wants to place is the right way to go – by applying a longtail approach to the SNW business, Brands can create a SNW dedicated to their own purposes. Take into account the Absolut example – a website focused on Co-Creation that has a simple Social Networking functionality but is a success case when considering the Brand engagement it created. If you have a good concept for your Brand, do not settle for generic applications – search for a specific approach inside your concept and make sure the user has a reason to engage in the Social Networking tools you provided them. Otherwise, they just might as well just go to Facebook…