Based on our analysis of current digital business practices, we can distill at least five major challenges:
1. Audience development is extremely challenging owing to poor site models and over-reliance on self-contained web sites.
2. News and classifieds are over emphasized as primary content and advertising categories. Little focus exists on meeting broader, local needs.
3. Share functionality, which has proven benefit for fast-tracking audience generation and increasing “stickiness,” is commonly misunderstood and ignored.
4. There is great difficulty offering personalized content and targeted advertising.
5. Non-commercial and commercial content are generally not integrated in “natural” ways.
Restated as five opportunities, we seek to develop a digital-business paradigm that will:
1. Grow audience faster by creating less reliance on sites as destinations and more reliance on “push” technologies.
2. Extend beyond news and classifieds to address the broader live needs of a community.
3. Increase speed of audience development and depth of user interaction by implementing rich Share functionality.
4. Support personal targeting of content (including advertising) in order to provide greater opportunity to advertisers.
5. Integrate personal and commercial data in natural and personalized ways, thus lending commercial messages greater efficacy.
[...] end, SNSs have displayed a profound ability to address aspects of all five opportunities outlined in a previous post. They provide mechanisms for rapid member development via one-to-many, sharing and email [...]