GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 4 - April 2008

GPWA TIMES | Cashing in on Social Networking 32 By Vin Narayanan Deep in the heart of Scottsdale, Ari- zona, a small desert city 30 minutes outside of Phoenix, sits a company with more than 65 employees work- ing hard at maintaining and develop- ing the U.K.’s fastest growing social network, PerfSpot. PerfSpot offers the usual array of so- cial networking tools: profiles, net- works, mail, picture sharing, blogs, public spaces for comment, etc. But unlike Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and others, it considers itself more than just a pure social networking site. “We’re a marketing company,” ex- plains Joshua Gray, PerfSpot’s senior international marketing executive. And PerfSpot’s next big play is the online gaming industry. Social networking by the numbers According toNielsenOnline, PerfSpot’s user base grew by 713% over nine months to 260,000 users as of Jan. 1, 2008. Worldwide, Perfspot says they have more than 8.5 million users and are registering about 40,000 new us- ers daily. The size of the total social networking audience is staggering as well. There are 69 million active users on Face- book. And more than 50 percent of Facebook users return to the site each day, according to metrics provided by Facebook. Bebo boasts 30 million us- ers worldwide, including 1 million in Ireland alone. “Social networking sites are becom- ing the hub Web sites,” Gray says. “They’re becoming the place where people find content and express themselves.” And the research bears that out. In the U.K., 39% of the adults with Internet access use social networking sites ac- cording to Ofcom, which regulates the British communications industry. That’s the second-highest adoption rate in the world according to Ofcom. Canadians have the highest adoption at 53%. The U.S. checks in at 34%. The Ofcom study also shows that U.K. Internet users spend a great deal of time on social networking sites. On average, Britons visit social network- ing sites 23 times a month and spend 5.3 hours a month on those sites. And the reason behind that is the user experience, says Gray. “If I go on my e-mail and just send, check and receive, I’m missing out on a vital part of the experience – and that experience is learning. Learn- ing about who I’m talking to, what I want to see on the Internet and how I’m going to find it. “I want to have a widget that I can order a pizza with. I want to be able to see 200 million videos. I want to be able to browse YouTube, AOL, MSN – everyone’s content all in the same place.” Online gaming meets social networking PerfSpot headquarters (inset) Joshua Gray, Senior International Marketing Executives