Social networking - what will happen in professional niches?

Published : 14 June 2010

Given that our Client base stretches across both B2B and Professional (B2P) players and professional associations and public sector bodies, we do see common marketplace themes.

The one that focuses our own attention is the impact on vertical marketplaces of the changes taking place in community behaviour and the impact this will have on those - be they Associations or commercial enterprises - who hitherto thought they had "owned" that vertical (community) space.

It is a theme which at last takes us beyond the occasionally "fluffiness" talked about communities and social networking – largely engaged in by enthusiastic "digerati " but stoked up as always by vendors.  And which at last enables discussion to be rooted where it always should be viz. in a rigorous view of the professional marketplace.

Underneath the hype, there is a genuine tectonic plate shift caused by the empowering nature of the web, as manifest in what we call “social media”. Look at the following statistics sourced recently by PARN (the research network of professional associations) – that 77% professional consumers now trust family, friends and work peers above retailers ; they are three times more likely to trust peers over advertising ; that 83% of them participate in some form of social media.

Now look at what we know about the tendency within professional  web communities for usage to consolidate around a leading brand. Facebook has conquered the consumer and Linked In the professional networking spaces. This is mirrored in niche digital communities – look at the classified housing market (Rightmove ), and its automotive cousin (Autotrader and...well, exactly!). In niche communities strong brands and early market innovation have enabled the likes of Farmers Weekly and ICAEW to stay ahead of the game and build their web service offerings in their market niches.

So what is our point or our Big Idea? Well, it is this:

There used to be a world where Associations helped manage the flow of “Knowledge” within their communities; and where B2B publishers mediated the flow of information between Buyers and Sellers, or professional publishers the information flow.

Now the distinctions between knowledge and advertising are finer because of what we said above – people are three times more likely to trust their peers than an advertiser. The old ways of teaching, communicating, learning are all changed.

To sell product you must be part of the knowledge flow; as part of the knowledge flow you must both impart more value if you are to survive in age of declining affiliation and membership value.

And so our big theme. There is little room in any niche community for an Association (other than those communities which are are handcuffed by mandatory qualification and accreditation benefits) which fails to move into the world occupied by the B2B/B2P players. And vice versa !.

We will see the squeezing and consolidation of all professional niche communities. We are seeing it already - emerging in different verticals. In, for example, the UK medical market  (where CMP and Haymarket struggle to compete with the BMA/BMJ). And the beginnings of an interesting global struggle in the world of engineering between the private equity backed GlobalSpecs and the UK’s IET and the IEEE – a struggle nonetheless real for neither of the latter yet recognising it! 

Community (re)colonisation will be the watchword of our next five years – with each vertical marketplace seeing its own particular transformation of affiliation and usage. And with winners of different heritage in each!