Adam Jewell - Search & Affiliate Marketing

Social networking is all the rage but for the most part it seems like a bunch of hype. My Space seems like yesterdays news, Facebook and privacy don’t belong in the same sentence and I haven’t found any compelling use for it. If you are going to dump all your personal information in a database somewhere it seems like you should get something for it. Of all the “social networking” sites out there, there seem to be two that are truely useful.

LinkedIn.com provides a great place for social business networking with their Q&A section and an intuitive easy to use interface. If you are looking for a job or business opportunities it’s a great place to be.

Meetup.com is more like a live social networking site. You know, not just somewhere where you dump a person information but where you find like minded people and actually go do things with them instead of just poking them or finding out what they are buying you for Christmas. Meetup puts the social in social networking.

How does Meetup.com work? Well, just like other social networking sites you sign up and create a profile. You don’t have to put in a ton of information but can put in as much as you want. Once you’ve signed up, you join groups. There are groups for just about anything you can imagine. Want to find a local windsurfing group? No sweat, there is one nearby in Wayne, PA. Hollywood Pete puts that one together. It doesn’t cost anything to join Meetup.com and get involved in one or more groups but it there may be an expense to actually go to the activities offered by the different groups.

Meetup makes money by charging people to create and maintian groups on the site. Prices range from $12.00 per month to $19.00 per month depending on how long you pay for the group. The $12.00 rate is for six months in advance, the $19.00 rate is if you pay by the month. Either way it is a social networking site with a business model that gets revenue from its subscibers. What a novel idea! There is some advertising on the site that may generate revenue but I’d bet most of the money they geneate comes from subsciption fees.

In addition to being a useful, social, social networking site, it can be a great place to start a business. When you create a meetup group, you set the price that people pay to attend events. It could be a dollar or two to cover the cost of the meetup group, it could be $1000.00 if you are putting together a group trip to go skiing in Colorado for a week.

So far, I’ve been to the windsurfing meetup and the local Plymouth Meeting Entrepreneurs meetup. Coming up soon are some other more adventurous events including a Zip Line canopy tour at Spring Mountain put together by TerraMar adventures, and a whitewater rafting trip up in the poconos also by Terramar. There are local Philadelphia salsa dance groups and there was a Segway football event last week. Whatever you want, you’ll find it on there!

So if you want to join or invest in (if they should go public) a social networking site that is actually useful and has a real revenue model, hop on over to Meetup.com, have a good time, start a business or make get some decent returns if they decide to go public!