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What was the first social network you ever joined?

While many people will recall it being Facebook or Twitter, others might remember some of the earlier, less popular social networks. You know, like Friendster, Open Diary, and Orkut? 

A lot these primitive social networks go forgotten, but that doesn’t make their stories any less important. After all, these networks laid the groundwork for the social media giants we use today.

In this blog post, we’ll dive into the stories of some of the earliest social networks — and why they didn’t stick around.

From Six Degrees to Snapchat: A Brief History of Social Media

One of the first versions of a modern social network, where users could create profiles and interact with one another, is Classmates.com, which launched in 1995 and allowed users to network and share messages and photos with their childhood and college classmates.

In 1997, SixDegrees was founded based on the theory that people are only separated by six levels of friends and family members. This was the first social platform that allowed users to create and curate profiles and laid the groundwork for online networking.

Blogging (on “weblogs,” as they were once called) came to the scene in 1998 with the launch of Open Diary, which included a social networking feature wherein users in groups could read each other’s writing. Open Diary laid the groundwork for later blogging social networks, such as Xanga and LiveJournal in 1999.

In 2002, Friendster launched with the purpose of helping “Circles of Friends” find one another to communicate. Friendster’s launch paved the way for sites like LinkedIn (2002), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004) to launch networks with similar features, such as Myspace’s Top Eight friends, Facebook friend groups, and LinkedIn connections.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s came Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Google+, which experimented with short-form and visual content, as well as aggregating and saving content for later consumption. Some of the latest social networks on the scene include Meerkat, Periscope, Instagram, and Snapchat — platforms based on sharing authentic, ephemeral, visual content that requires as few words as possible.

Of course, this is a very brief history — and several social networks were launched and forgotten during this timeline. Needless to say, those networks still played a role in the development of the bigger social landscape we know and use today. Let’s discuss some of the networks we’ve forgotten and why they didn’t stick around.

5 Dead Social Networks You Might Not Remember

1) Friendster

When

Friendster launched in 2002, was rebranded as a social gaming website in 2011, and shuttered completely in 2015.

What

Friendster was the first network that allowed friends to create profiles and share content with their contacts. Friendster was also used to learn about local events, pop culture news, and to connect with brands also sharing information on the platform. At its peak, Friendster had roughly 115 million users around the world.

Source: VentureBeat

Why it Failed

The deeper issues that led to the demise of Friendster were analyzed by computer scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, who conducted Friendster’s “autopsy.” They cited a disastrous site redesign in 2009, after which traffic and users plummeted.

They also determined that the time and effort it took to navigate the Friendster network outweighed the benefits of using it. According to their research, social networks with many users who only had one or two friends were much more vulnerable to collapse than networks with users who had several friends. Stronger networks made up of lots of people meant that if one person left the network, the rest of their friends wouldn’t necessarily follow suit. But if a user had only two friends in a social network and one deleted their account, they would be more likely to do the same — it would be a boring experience on the platform otherwise.

Friendster wasn’t widely adopted by users’ friends and families, so their time was better spent on other networks where more of their real-world network was online — namely, on Facebook and Myspace.

2) Eons

When

Eons.com was launched in 2006 and shut down in 2012.

What

Eons was designed to be a social network for baby boomers. Touted as “Myspace for boomers,” it set age restrictions that prevented anyone under the age of 50 from joining– however, the age restriction was lowered to 40 in 2008. The site never experienced a huge boom in popularity around its launch, and at its peak, it reached roughly 800,000 users.

Source: Wayback Machine

Why it Failed

The age targeting was restrictive for a reason, but it also prevented the site from being widely popularized. Additionally, in 2006, social media was just coming onto the horizon and wasn’t adopted widely enough to get a successful network out of such a small user group.

3) Orkut

When

Orkut was launched by Google in 2004 and shut down in 2014.

What

After Google tried and failed to purchase Friendster, it launched Orkut as a place for people to add friends and share content. Orkut allowed users to check out profiles, rate friends and add them to lists, and “like” other friends’ posts. At its peak, Orkut had 300 million users around the world.

Source: ReadWrite

Why it Failed

Orkut primarily took hold in a few countries, such as India and Brazil, but never achieved widespread international popularity. Additionally, the Orkut team cited the growth of Google’s other social media assets as a reason to shutter the site. At the time, YouTube and Google+ were outpacing Orkut’s growth, so Google refocused on these platforms in an attempt to compete against Facebook on social media.

4) Ping

When

Ping was launched as an iTunes feature in 2010 and was closed in 2012.

What

When he launched Ping in 2010, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs referred to it as “Facebook and Twitter meets iTunes.” Ping was a social networking feature within iTunes where users could add friends, follow artists, and look up local concerts. Friends could also preview songs their friends were downloading and listening to.

Source: AppStorm

Why it Failed

Ping was originally planned to feature an integration with Facebook that would allow Ping users to easily connect with friends and artists they already followed on Facebook, but the partnership fell through, leaving Ping users with a blank slate on which to build another social network of people to follow.

Additionally, Ping only allowed users to listen to 90-second previews of songs in its network — any longer, and they had to buy the song. Since Ping was part of iTunes, it became redundant instead of an enhanced experience. Apple replaced Ping with a better integration with Facebook and Twitter in 2012 that allowed for easy music sharing.

5) Open Diary

When

Open Diary was founded in 1997 and closed in 2014.

What

Open Diary was an online blogging and journaling website that laid the groundwork for features we see on modern blogs — such as blog comments. Writers could add friends and change privacy settings so specific people would see what they were writing, and Open Diary eventually expanded into different topic areas so users could all write about different themes together.

Source: Wayback Machine

Why it Failed

After two major security breaches, falling subscription revenue led the Open Diary team to start offering more expensive paid subscription options to recoup its losses. This move drove more users away toward free alternative blogging sites, such as Xanga and LiveJournal.

Lessons for Marketers from Failed Social Media

There are several lessons for modern marketers in the stories of these forgotten social networks. We’re not saying you’re at risk of killing your brand, but keeping these ideas in mind may help you maintain and grow your followers and engage with them authentically and helpfully.

1) Meet your audience where they already are.

Social networks have failed because brands tried to reinvent something that was already working, or gave users extra work to do in order to participate. Ping asked users to recreate existing social networks on its platform, and Open Diary writers didn’t invest in expensive memberships because the site only offered them blog networking. There’s value in this lesson for marketers, too.

Instead of trying to make your audience do extra work in order to engage with you, make it easy for them to like, consume, and share your social media content. Here are some ideas, if you’re not already doing them:

• Provide helpful, actionable content that helps your audience learn skills and come back for more information from a trusted source.
• Optimize your blog content so it can easily be shared and consumed on social media using tools like Click to Tweet, Pinterest “Pin This” buttons, and other embedded social media share widgets.
• If you have a huge audience on one social media platform but not another, don’t try to force it on the other platform for the sake of engagement. Develop a strategy for sharing platform-specific content that those users enjoy instead of blasting out identical posts across all networks.

Part of Facebook’s success and longevity is due to its creation of an infrastructure where users don’t need to leave Facebook in order to get things done. It’s grown beyond just a social network into a destination for news, commerce, and content consumption.

Marketers should experiment with new technologies and offerings to keep followers interacting with their brand more, such as creating helpful chatbots, publishing on new forms of media, and trying new strategies like virtual reality or experiential marketing to keep audiences engaged and on a website or social platform for as long as possible.

2) Borrow from your competitors.

Borrow another page from the Facebook playbook and be aware of what your competitors are doing. A few more memorable social media platforms — such as Meerkat and Vine — were recently shuttered because another network took what the brands were doing and did it bigger and better. A recent example of this was Instagram’s rollout of disappearing messages, which was launched by Snapchat.

Take a peek at the content competitors in your space are pursuing. Are these brands getting lots of engagement with Twitter polls, Instagram user-generated content contests, or Facebook Live videos? Which blog posts get shared the most on social media? Use tools like BuzzSumo to determine how your competitors are achieving success, and try to replicate it in your own content and social media marketing efforts.

3) Be authentic and not overly self-promotional.

There are different reasons why Ping and Open Diary didn’t succeed, but a common thread between the stories is the brands’ attempts to monetize. Users didn’t respond well to Ping advertising iTunes music without letting them listen to full songs, and Open Diary users didn’t want to pay for a service that was free on other competing sites.

Social media is about sharing authentic content with friends and family, and audiences don’t want to visit a site or app that constantly serves advertisements. This lesson can be applied to your entire content marketing strategy, including social media, in a few ways:

• Every social media post doesn’t need to advertise something related to your brand. If you’re posting about a blog post or a campaign, share additional data or information that’s useful to your audience.
• Offer free tools, guides, and strategies for success that help your audience succeed without forcing them to enter credit card information.
• Publish blog content with a diverse array of examples and case studies from different brands and experts in your industry. Bitly did a great job of this in an advice roundup:

The next time a new social network comes onto the scene, we’ll be here to tell you the story — and predict if it will be here to stay. In the meantime, keep yourself informed about the latest techniques for social media marketing and advertising with the help of our comprehensive guides.

What was your favorite social media network that’s no longer operational? Share with us in the comments below.

Video content is no longer an option: It’s a necessary component of any successful marketing strategy.

The good news? Your audience wants to see more videos from you, and they engage with them at higher rates than other types of content. Email open and clickthrough rates improve when the word “video” is used in subject lines, and 4X as many people would prefer to watch a video about a product than read about it.

Even though you know your audience wants more video content, you might not know exactly what they want. Accenture Interactive surveyed more than 1,000 consumers to learn more about how they interact with video content and how marketers can create videos that will get clicked, watched, and shared. Read about their insights in Adweek’s infographic below.

The media needs content to report, and marketers need exposure for their content. Together, it seems like these two would have a pretty simple, mutually beneficial relationship, right?

Unfortunately, like most modern-day relationships, it’s never really that simple. Marketers and PR professionals have long been denounced by the media as spin doctors thanks to poor outreach practices and failing to create valuable content that goes beyond selling a product or service.

Luckily, the industry is evolving past the point of flooding the inboxes of time-starved journalists with irrelevant press releases with the help of more strategic outreach planning. Just as marketing has shifted toward an inbound strategy of attracting a specific audience rather than forcing messages to the masses, PR has assumed a similar mindset by strategically targeting the best-fit publications and influencers to promote content made for a target audience rather than a “spray and pray” mentality.

Still, pitching isn’t easy, but communication is key for building and nurturing the symbiotic relationship between marketers and the media. That’s why my team at Fractl surveyed over 1,300 writers, editors, and contributors at countless publications to get a better idea of how to guide our own media outreach strategy.

The information proved to be invaluable for our digital PR team, so we wanted to share how the publishers’ insights can help your team improve your brand’s media outreach efforts in a five-step guide.

5 Steps for Improving Your Media Outreach

Define your audience.

Marketers know defining your ideal buyer persona offers helpful insights to guide everything from product development to content creation. In that same vein, gathering information about stakeholders across your brand is immensely helpful in defining your ideal target audience for content distribution.

Further, understanding not only the demographics, challenges, and motivations of your target audience, but also their online (and offline) behavior will help define your ideal audience and ultimately guide your outreach strategy. Specifically, it will help you better understand where they consume their news, turn to for insights and advice, and seek out entertainment.

Build media lists.

Become familiar with the publications and media outlets your ideal audience frequents, then vet the publications before going on to research the best-fit contact. Run through a mental checklist for each publication before adding them to your list build:

• Do they publish third-party content?
• Do they regularly post on the topic you’re planning to pitch?
• Do they frequently promote their posts via other channels like social media?

Once the publication has passed this quick preliminary phase, go on to find the best-fit contact by scanning through their editorial contact list. Further research a few contacts whose beat fits your content and trace their online footprint. Start following them on their professional social accounts and keep an eye out for their recent work or contributions to other online media like podcasts. Commenting on their latest post or podcast appearance, or giving your genuine opinion about a topic you’re both well-versed in, is a great way to start off your pitch.

Obviously their beat must align with the topic of the content you plan to pitch, but make sure you also run through the second mental checklist:

• Do they cite content produced by brands?
• Do their posts see a lot of engagement?
• Do they cover only breaking news or only write personal essays and critics, or do they feature timely and evergreen content?
• Do they demonstrate values that align with your brand?

Researching who to contact can be time consuming, especially when initially starting a media outreach strategy. Fortunately, as time goes on, the investment pays off in the form of established, mutually beneficial relationships.

Grab their attention.

You only have one chance to make a good first impression, and when it comes to pitching, you only have a few seconds to make sure your email stands out in the overflowing inboxes of busy journalists. There are really only two things that can set a pitch apart at first glance: the sender (i.e., your name and email address) and the subject line.

While you can eventually build relationships and gain credibility solely on your name, your subject line is initially the deciding factor when it comes to whether or not your pitch is even opened, let alone read. Considering 57% of publishers receive between 50 and 500 pitches per week, it’s imperative to take your subject line seriously and consider some A/B testing.

After sending hundreds of pitches, I’ve learned treating subject lines like potential article headlines that match the journalist’s style of writing seems to have a higher open rate and the pitch is more likely to get a response — and our survey results support this observation. My theory is emulating their diction and syntax while also offering a compelling statistic or high-level summary of your content helps them envision a story.

Like news headlines, subject lines can be straightforward, data-driven facts pulled from the content, or can pose a question to pique curiosity about the content’s findings. According to our survey, news organizations opt for stat-heavy subject lines while beats like finance prefer more inquisitive subject lines.

Another option well-suited for more conversational pitches is to personalize the subject line based on the information you find while researching your potential contact. The survey revealed lifestyle and entertainment writers are most likely to open a personalized email compared with other types of subject lines.

It varies by beat, but only 2% of publisher revealed they never read pitches while nearly 45% always or often read them. These numbers indicate the odds of your pitch getting seen are more likely than not, so journalists moving a pitch straight to the spam folder should not be the go-to reasoning for a pitch going unanswered. Instead, consider the contents of the pitch itself.

Develop the story.

The best pitches outline the story relevant to the writer’s unique audience clearly and concisely. Consider potential news headlines and the key message your content is conveying to that specific audience. Communicate the valuable newsworthy elements of the content (more on that below) and call out the most compelling or emotional insights from the content in a quick bullet list. In many cases, the same piece of objective content can offer several different story angles that would interest multiple audience profiles, so be sure to tailor the elements and insights you call out to the writer’s audience.

Since pitches should be 100–200 words max (half of survey respondents preferred this cursory length compared with just 10% preferring over 300 words), data visualizations and other visual media are ideal assets to link in your pitch to further support such a story angle without blocks of text. In fact, when asked what type of supporting assets they wish to see more of, publishers revealed visual content formats like infographics, photos, and videos were highest in demand, while generic press releases and text-heavy white papers fell to the bottom of the list.

Prove your value.

An attention-grabbing subject line, personalized introduction, and uniquely developed story are vital components to an effective pitch, but they won’t mean anything if you fail to prove your content’s value to the writer and their audience.

The media strives to report and share original, newsworthy content from credible sources, so be sure you highlight how your content aligns with their priorities by explaining how it exemplifies these three qualities of valuable content:

• Credible: Journalism ethics stress citing content whose data is credible and authoritative, so be sure to include the data source or methodology in which your content is based on.
• Newsworthy: Highlight newsworthy elements of the content like its timeliness to a trending topic or proximity to a local readership.
• Relevant: As mentioned above, point out how your content relates and will resonate to the publication’s audience. Will it educate, entertain, or inspire their readers?

While it may seem time consuming to thoroughly research every single reporter you email, write a personal connection to kick off every single pitch, or tailor a value proposition to each audience, it’s time well spent to make your pitch stand out.

As important as creativity is to an agency’s success, no great work can be produced without a great process.

Next time you admire a stunning design project, think for a moment: This work looks great, but did it go out on time? Did the project exceed budget? Was the client actually happy with the end result? Did the team run into any major project management roadblocks?

Modern agency processes like Growth-Driven Design (GDD for short) and the Agile Methodology give us a new way to optimize the production of creative projects, helping us develop work that consistently looks great and exceeds client expectations.

Adopting these innovations for your agency might seem like a no-brainer. What client doesn’t enjoy faster delivery, higher user satisfaction, and lower financial risk?

Your team, however, might be harder to sell on adopting a design process.

To develop a sustainable process for your design team, everyone at your agency needs to play a part. Check out our tips for each department below, and make developing a design process a painless company-wide effort.

A Culture Change for Designers

At most agencies, creative thinking lies with designers, art directors, and creative directors. Their unrestricted imaginations and out-of-the-box thinking bring forth new ideas and inventive solutions to clients’ problems.

However, many creative people have trouble putting external limitations — deadlines, budgets, client demands — on their ideas. Sometimes, individual self-expression is allowed to override business concerns.

For Growth-Driven Design to work, a culture change might be required at your agency. Designers, crazy as it may sound, shouldn’t be the sole drivers of design decisions. They must also be driven by end users’ needs, as dictated by feedback and behavior data.

From this comes the concept of the Launch Pad website: a website tailored for a fast initial release. Short production time and early collection of feedback is prioritized over completeness or perfection. Non-essential elements, features, or content are omitted. That’s why the GDD process has us releasing websites earlier than ever — the Launch Pad stage enables us to gather crucial user data earlier in the process than other design methodologies.

Be sure that your design team has a fluent understanding of your customer personas, and that empathy for the customer is the center of their creative process. Provide training in user experience design — a relatively young field rarely taught in art schools — so they have the tools and concepts they need to connect their visuals to real world use cases.

Restraints are often the key to producing the best creative solutions. Imposing some limitations creates a starting point from which to judge the strength of a design decision. Working around a limitation means designers are forced to think harder for a solution, pushing the limits of their creativity.

Focus Development and QA on the End User

Technologists, too, can be creative thinkers — envisioning a website as an elegant, modern, efficient, and ever-improving system of code. Talented developers hate compromising the quality of their code due to external limitations such as deadlines. They too might try to run a project over time or budget in order to be able to execute the ideal solution.

When their requests are refused, job satisfaction suffers. QA engineers are often the biggest proponents of high technology standards and user advocacy. Such enthusiasm should be encouraged.

In technical fields as well as creative, the key is finding a way to harness and channel this commitment for quality towards solving real business problems. Technology professionals must also learn to not let their creativity derail a project. Ensure that any proposed features or improvements are a means to an end, and align with your major project goals.

No matter how beautifully a system runs on the backend, or how cutting-edge a new feature is, there must be a tangible benefit to the user on the front end. Perhaps the site now loads faster, better protects sensitive information, or is easier to use on mobile devices.

Improvements to code can also have a benefit to the agency itself. They can make the site easier and faster for developers to update, improving overall team velocity. They may make it more forward-compatible with the latest technologies, reducing the need to rebuild and refactor in the future.

It’s also important for a smooth-running process that QA is an ongoing effort from the very beginning of a project. If QA starts too close to the release date, there will likely be inadequate time to rectify issues. QA engineers should be included in the design process, where they may add UX suggestions based on their user feedback experience.

Tighter Project Management

Project managers are the stewards of process and efficiency. Their challenge in these new paradigms is assigning the team a workload that can be done — to completion — in a single iteration cycle. PMs interface most often with other departments, and are the ones to whom demands and requirements are made. They must not give into the pressure to say yes to everything, while not knowing for sure that the team can deliver.

A certain level of pessimism is crucial for proper project and resource planning. “Underpromise and overdeliver” can’t be said enough. When working on fixed-length work cycles, deadlines can’t just be arbitrarily pushed back. However, this also grants the permission to be iterative — whatever couldn’t get done this release can always be done next time. Even requests from the highest levels of management must be carefully evaluated and prioritized appropriately.

PMs will also need to learn to communicate more frequently with their teams. Release cycles are shorter than before, so a single day represents a greater percentage of the timeline. Just one unproductive day can derail a release from delivery.

This makes enforcing practices like the a daily stand-up — where each team member recaps the previous day, outlines their plan for today, and airs any problems or critical blockers — absolutely essential. They must also be sure to facilitate intra-team communication amongst members working in different roles to reduce the chance that blockers will arise.

A More Grounded Approach for Marketing and Sales

Strategic planning, market research, and conversion rate optimization are among the components of GDD that marketing and sales people will embrace right from the start. Their difficulty will likely be getting used to the idea of iterative releases. They may resist the idea that what the agency releases into the world isn’t “finished” or “perfect” the first time. They might even feel embarrassed — like the company is going outside without its pants on.

Then can rest easy, however, knowing that releasing a Launch Pad site is more akin to going out in department store slacks. It’s a perfectly professional solution, and much faster and less expensive than a bespoke suit. You’ll invest in the tailored suit once you figure out precisely what kind of suit you should be wearing in the first place. That way, you don’t run the risk of having to toss it and pay for a second suit when you figure out it wasn’t the right style for you.

Your marketing and sales team might be the most appreciative of the fact that that design decisions are now based on real world user data and research, collected through meticulous experimentation. Guesswork is kept to a minimum.

Your agency is now delivering value to clients and users faster and more accurately than ever — why not make this the cornerstone of your company’s own marketing and sales strategy? Sales reps should be proud to let clients and leads know how much of their money and time your agency will save them, and how tuned in you are to their needs. It should be music to their ears.

Earn Buy-in from Executive Management

Managing expectations from those who are setting the direction of the company — the c-suite — is key to successful GDD implementation. They will demand to know what the ROI and bottom-line results are of making such a large time investment. Get them involved in setting goals and focus metrics, as well as prioritizing action items, and show them the results of each strategic experiment.

It’s important for managers to be involved not just in strategic planning, but also in continuous improvement. Even if you are a busy executive, take the time to prioritize your GDD training, as well as training your team members — they will be looking to your leadership when things get rocky or uncertain.

As you dive deeper into the methodology, you’ll find it resonates with already familiar truths and concept: inbound marketing, user-centered design, customer personas, KPIs.

Your c-suite may find GDD confusing at first, or be hesitant to jump on some new business fad. However, once they get on board, it won’t be difficult to see how the process serves your own agency’s business needs as well as it serves your clients.

Your Team is Responsible for Change

Agency business leaders are well practiced in the art of communicating their creative vision to their team, and ensuring it is carried out. Though you may be the one championing a new Growth-Driven Design process, your team members are the ones who will make the revolution happen at your company. By understanding their unique needs and viewpoints, everyone on the team can become your fellow champions of process.