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For years I've been singing the praises of niche outreach and waiting to see niche social networking overtake general social networks (like Facebook) with the public. I'm sad to say it hasn't happened as quickly as I would have liked. Too many people are still wasting too much time trying to be everything to everyone. That said, niche social networking is here, and it's been around much longer than some of you probably realize. Let's explore niche social networking, what might be holding it back, and where things are going well for niche social networks.

Social networks seemed poised to take over the Web. This year, Facebook reached 800 million users. LinkedIn went public in a blockbuster stock offering. Twitter produced a billion tweets per week. And Google launched its own social network, Google+, attracting 25 million users in one month. Amid the continued growth of these social networks, there has been much excitement about how the rest of the Web would soon be infused with all things "social": social search, social commerce, social deals and more. And yet the effort to socialize the rest of the Web has so far failed to live up to its promise. Why?

There is a growing demand for the ability to connect to others. It is with each other that we can make sense, and this is social. Organizations, in order to function, need to encourage social exchanges and social learning due to faster rates of business and technological changes. Social experience is adaptive by nature and a social learning mindset enables better feedback on environmental changes back to the organization.

In the knowledge economy, content is no longer sufficient - everyone has access to a multitude of content. You cannot compete on what everyone knows. As you move up the hierarchy, it becomes more difficult to compete on individual competency - everyone is highly skilled and experienced at the top. It is hard to compete when everyone is so similar. The new advantage is context - how internal and external content is interpreted, combined, made sense of, and converted to new products and services. Creating competitive context requires social capital - the ability to find, utilize and combine the skills, knowledge and experience of others, inside and outside of the organization. Social capital is derived from employees' professional and business networks. The new competitive landscape requires focusing on between-employee factors, the connections that combine to create new processes, products and services. Social capital encompasses communities of practice, knowledge exchanges, information flows, interest groups, social networks and other emergent connections between employees, suppliers, regulators, partners and customers.

"PPT discusses how to use social collaboration to re-energize your workforce and optimize your core business processes with purpose driven collaboration. Learn how to streamline problem solving, execute faster and drive rapid decision making to achieve your core operational and financial performance metrics. Learn how The Transformational Opportunity from Social Collaboration will come from closing Business Loops: - Customer Performance = Traditional CRM + Customer Networks - Talent Performance = Talent Management + Talent Networks - Financial Performance & Risk Mitigation = Financial Management + Performance Networks - Supply Chain Performance = Supply Chain Management + Business Networks "

We feel the need to belong, to form a part of a group who make us feel wanted, and loved and understood. And what better place to do that than the Internet? We're not suggesting you stop going out more often, but there are increasing signs of "like-minded" individuals e-huddling together and carrying out activities which are of common interest, and this is where niche social networking steps in.  By targeting a specific audience, a niche social networking site is able to create an automatic bond between people

Social ads are increasingly assuming mainstream status, as brands focus on devising newer ways to engage user attention. While traditional advertisers focus on targeting users with contextual ads wherein ads are served on the basis of content, in social advertising factors such as peer and social influences as well as recommendations are taken into consideration for targeting users. Rapid increase in social media activities in the recent years has driven advertisers to take up social ads.

"Virtually everywhere one looks we are in the midst of a transition for how we organize and manage information, indeed even relationships. Social networks and online communities are changing how we live and interact. NoSQL and graph databases - married to their near cousin Big Data - are changing how we organize and store information and data. Semantic technologies, backed by their ontologies and RDF data model, are showing the way for how we can connect and interoperate disparate information in ways only dreamed about a decade ago. And all of this, of course, is being built upon the infrastructure of the Internet and the Web, a global, distributed network of devices and information that is undoubtedly one of the most important technological developments in human history. There is a shared structure across all of these developments - the graph. Graphs are proving to be the new universal paradigm for how we organize and manage information. Graphs have an inherently expandable nature, and one which can also capture any existing structure. So, as we see all of the networks, connections, relationships and links - both physical and informational - grow around us, it is useful to step back a bit and contemplate the universal graph structure at the core of these developments. Understanding that we now live in the Age of the Graph means we can begin studying and using the concept of the graph itself to better analyze and manage our interconnected world. Whether we are trying to understand the physical networks of supply chains and infrastructure or the information relationships within ontologies or knowledge graphs, the various concepts underlying graphs and graph theory, themselves expressed through a rich vocabulary of terms, provide the keys for unlocking still further treasures hidden in the structure of graphs."

Although we learn every day, in everything we do, whether it is in what we read, watch or listen to, or in the conversations and discussions we have with other people, at some time people started believing that the only important learning happens in a formal setting, e.g. in a school classroom or a university lecture hall.

In any industry, the need to manage your brand's community is pressing. Companies have invested significant resources into building community on social networks, but as Facebook and other social media sites continue to block access to your user data, smart marketers and business leaders are realizing that the real value of social engagement is found on their own web properties and applications. Gamification offers a means of applying the benefits of social engagement directly to your properties. It is a proven business strategy that enables businesses to influence the behaviors of your entire community, and exceed your user-driven business objectives.

How do you manage a workforce that is both nomadic and collaborative? In a 24/7 always-on- and-interconnected world, do we need to rethink the industrial-workplace social contract that's based on hours worked and being on-the-job ? Join Harold Jarche to discuss how these and other trends mean a shift to perpetual Beta, where learning is the work.

As the fundamental flow of energy through the marketplace transforms from 'push' to 'pull,' organizations will need to become more active and participative social networkers.  New opportunities will show up first on the myriad of non-structured, social media sites that cater to people who want to collaborate to solve problems, start trends, influence the masses and build support.

The Net, especially working and learning in networks, subverts many of the hierarchies we have developed over hundreds of years. Formal education is one example, as shown in this excellent article by Cathy Davidson:

If you've used the mobile social network Path recently, it's likely that you enjoyed the experience. Path has a sophisticated design, yet it's easy to use. It sports an attractive red color scheme and the navigation is smooth as silk. It's a social app and finding friends is easy thanks to Path's suggestions and its connection to Facebook. In short, Path has a great user experience. That isn't the deciding factor on whether a tech product takes off. Ultimately it comes down to how many people use it and that's particularly important for a social app like Path. Indeed it's where Path may yet fail, but the point is they have given themselves a chance by creating a great user experience. In this post, we outline 5 signs that the tech product or app you're using has a great UX - and therefore has a shot at being the Next Big Thing.

A great deal has changed since the term eLearning first entered the vocabulary in 1999 and since web-based courses and modules started appearing in volume in the early 2000s. We need to rethink eLearning in light of these changes and other changes (like Social Learning) that are only now starting to impact the world of work. I'm sure most of us are aware that the major challenge for learning is no longer about 'content' or 'knowledge' (if it ever were).

"For about five years around the turn of the century most of my days were spent helping clients manage their knowledge. Back in 2000 knowledge management (KM) was really big. Every year I'd head off to Amsterdam for the obligatory industry conference, KM Europe. We even had our own home grown conference, KM UK, with pretty much the same people but with less impressive venues. Then suddenly things went quiet - KM Europe was suddenly cancelled in 2005, KM UK limped along (and is still going today). KM had lost its way. The promises hadn't been fulfilled. Of course KM just didn't disappear overnight - it just degraded gracefully. One client, a very large UK multinational, shed their KM teams and announced that KM was now 'embedded in the business'. KM still goes on but it's likely to be on the margins and not essential for peak organisational performance whereas in 2000 KM really was positioned as a game changer. So what happened? That's a good question and one which this post is my first attempt at exploring why KM failed to deliver on its early promises. And why do this sort of navel gazing now? Because knowledge management appears to be making a comeback but this time it has a shiny new suit and it's called social learning."

I like this article. It is forward thinking and visionary.

Worldwide social network ad revenues will reach $5.54 billion this year, eMarketer estimates, with just under half that amount, $2.74 billion, coming from the US market.