Industry-Specific Social Networking
By Stephanie Critchfield on Friday, August 24th, 2007We all know MySpace and Facebook … LinkedIn. We’re now learning about sites like Twitter, Dandelife and many more.
Well, I was reading the Adfreak blog and it seems the folks from Adweek, Brandweek, Mediaweek, and Marketing y Medios recently launched a social networking site of their own, At The Roundtable. And, it’s pretty good. It’ll be interesting to watch this grow - and I’ll definitely be signing up. (ok, I already did.)
Certainly this was going to happen - social sites geared toward a specific industry. We already knew sites like Facebook that catered to the school set (even though the site is now for everyone), so industry social sites were only a matter of time.
So, I did a little “googling” and discovered there’s actually quite a few community-specific sites brewing right now:
- Shelfari - an online community for book lovers.
- Sermo - for physicians.
- Travbuddy - to find people traveling where you are, see reviews of places you want to go, and read experiences of users.
- MyChurch - a site for, well, Christian church-goers.
- Respectance - a social site for mourning the loss of loved ones.
- Flirtomatic - A dating site. Ok, I’ll be honest … the name just tickled me, so I had to include it.
Does anyone else know of social networking sites that are specific to an industry?
Social networking sites are expanding like crazy! Well I guess i am partly to blame since I work for Shelfari
We just launched a new blog widget and would love to hear your feedback on it. Try it out and let me know what you think.
Happy Reading,
Dave
Thanks Dave! We’ll definately check out your widget!
Has anybody visited these two websites -
somuchworld.com and travelbookmarking.com. Somuchworld.com has a reviews section and travelbookmarking.com (as the name suggests) is social bookmarking specific to the travel industry and you can also build your own travel guide online.
They also have introductory
videos showing you how to use them at somuchworld.com/about/intro and travelbookmarking.com/proof
I think they are really helpful and a bit different from others I have seen. The only thing I would say is that the reviews sections feel a little bit empty still and probably need a bit more content.
Ruth
travelbookmarking.com
social bookmarking just for travel. I love it. What an overcluttered spammy crappy industry online. How refreshing to use 2.0 tools as a quality indicator and not just some kind of a trendy, geeky fad.
Shelfari is one of my favorite sites for books, and thanks for the travelbookmarking link, what a great niche idea. Good luck.
I have installed the Shelfari widget in Facebook. It’s really neat! I can store my fav books, rate them, recommend them. I can even see reviews of books that my friends have and create a list of “want to read” books. I like.