Edward Sussman at Fastcompany writes:-
“We’re an entirely new community of people brought together because we want to share ideas about business. We like business. We think it’s important. Work gives more meaning to our lives. We believe business profoundly helps define our culture.”
and quotes Mark Zuckerberg “A pure social network tries to recreate what Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook calls the “social graph” of a community that already exists.”
This is like asking “Which Came First, The Chicken or The Egg? .
I will just say this :-
FastCompany is a well established brand and has quality readers from 1995, so you don’t have to compare yourself with Facebook or any other social networks and write something like “we are a new community”, you just changed your site design , improved reader registration and trying help members to network with each other, even if you claim you are social network for business that’s ok you are a great brand. After reading lot of analysis about fastcompany’s recent changes and listening to lot of web strategy experts like me 
It’s better to do this “Listen to your readers, do what they want you to do in your new website”.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Ely Rosenstock // Feb 12, 2008 at 8:50 pm
I find it quite amusing how media news sites, like Fast Company, don’t understand that there are niches on the web, and one site can’t be everything to everyone. Any site can have a community, but a social network is an entirely different animal. A social network shouldn’t be a news site and vice versa.
Prakash, I think you’re right. Listen to the readers (not advertisers), and you’ll find success in your niche.
2 ann // Feb 13, 2008 at 6:26 am
Entrepreneur Training, How to Get Customers and Rapid Business Growth
By Chet Holmes
The following strategy has probably helped more companies double their sales faster than any other single concept.
The Ultimate Sales Machine will always look to be as efficient as possible. In a sentence: There’s always a smaller number of “best buyers” than there are all buyers. That means that marketing to them is cheaper than marketing to all buyers. But it’s how you market and sell to them that determines whether or not you will ever get them. When Charlie Munger put me in charge of ad sales for one of his magazines, they had a database of 2200 potential advertisers.
I did a market analysis and found that 167 of them bought 95% of the advertising in the top four magazines. This was especially important because these four magazines were getting all of the really valuable advertising in this market. None of these advertisers were in our magazine and we were all the way down at number 15 in terms of market share in our field.
By focusing intently on those dream 167 buyers, I was able to get 30 of them into the magazine in the first year. Suddenly executives who had never heard from us before were now hearing from us so intensely from every direction that within six months we had 28 of them in the magazine. That alone doubled the sales of the magazine. These were the big advertisers. When they came in, it was for premium positions—full color spreads, the inside front cover, back cover, etc. Up until that point, we had been scraping by on revenue from quarter-page, third-page, and a few half-page ads. We doubled the sales the next year by keeping those best buyers in the magazine and bringing in another 30. We doubled it again, a third year in a row, by bringing in the rest of the 167 the best buyers.
When I doubled sales three years in a row, Charlie Munger said, “Are you sure we’re not lying, cheating and stealing because, in all my years, I’ve never seen anybody double sales three years in a row.”
Naturally, we weren’t doing any such thing. We were just marketing and selling better than any of our competitors. That, and we truly had built the ultimate sales machine with procedures and policies for selling that all the salespeople had to follow.
Best buyers buy more, buy faster and buy more often than other buyers. These are your ideal clients. No matter what else you are doing, you should be making an additional effort to capture them. I call this strategy the Dream 100 effort. It is your program for targeting your 100 (or whatever number is appropriate) dream clients constantly and relentlessly until they buy your product or service. The goal of the Dream 100 is to take your ideal buyers from “I’ve never heard of this company” to “Who is this company I keep hearing about” to “I think I’ve heard of that company” to “Yes, I’ve heard of that company” to “Yes, I do business with that company.”
Chet Holmes has worked with over 60 of the Fortune 500 companies as America’s top marketing executive, trainer, and strategic consultant. Chet is the author of the best selling book, The Ultimate Sales Machine (#1 business book on Amazon, #1 Sales and Marketing book on Amazon, and also on NY Times best seller list). Chet has identified and developed the 12 core competencies that are proven to provide the main structure of truly great companies and he has developed more than fifty proprietary methods to implement them. To learn more about how to double the sales of your company, go to http://www.howtodoublesales.com
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