This project began as a way for the innovation team to articulate ideas, capture experiences, and provide a source of both innovation and insight throughout our network and, as well, to the outside world. Your contribution will bring that idea to life.

This post acts as both a call to our invited contributors and a compass for this experiment.

It’s easy to get started. Take away the minefield of “no’s” that often surrounds corporate communication and replace them with these four content guidelines:

1. 70/30/0 . 70% of your content should be directly related to your discipline, while 30% of it can be interesting stuff you feel is relevant in a general sense. 0% client business.
2. The medium is the message . Blogging is best when it is clear, thorough, and succinct.
3. Always, always check yourself for spelling and grammatical errors . That may mean posting a day later than you had hoped.
4. Remember, you’re writing under the company name . Keep your personal life private and always respect the privacy of our clients.

Our contributors’ individual entries are not screened, so professional discretion is a must.

Looking at the blog as a whole, we’ve decided to put some guidelines in place

Overall, there are three ideas we must all keep in mind to ensure that our blog maintains a higher degree of credibility:

1. Be honest . Posts written under your name should be yours.
2. Stay on topic . If we start espousing political beliefs or going otherwise awry, then we may as well shut down.
3. Keep it coming . Posts should be maintain a regular schedule.

Essentially, that’s it. Keep the above principles in mind and we should all be able to turn this into a positive and fluid project for both the company and the greater marketing community.

It should go without saying, but perhaps it warrants being said anyway: Thank you, and have fun.

The December comScore data for the United States was released recently and has set bloggers all a buzz. Most seem to crying out about how online social networks are slowing down , because growth on several of the largest networking sites has slowed and MySpace’s numbers have dropped a bit. I’d like to offer a different perspective.

The slow down in growth on the largest social networking sites is not the death knoll of the whole concept of social networking sites. It is, however, a wake up call to reality.

The issue isn’t really that these sites are slowing down, it’s that more targeted niche sites are heating up. MySpace’s numbers boomed when the press discovered it and everyone, including your mother, decided to check it out. The level of growth that site saw could never be supported. As the media is fickle and always looking for the next big thing to write about, it quickly moved on to Facebook. Once again many people, including your mother, moved on to Facebook.

But what the press doesn’t really talk about, and the comScore numbers don’t reflect, is all of the other niche social networking sites that are out there. These affinity-based social networking sites provide users with a group that has common ground. MySpace and Facebook don’t really do that, unless you are actually friends in the real-world definition of the word. People who may have spent time on MySpace may now be found instead on BakeSpace , Ravelry , Mashable , LinkedIn , Gather , or any of thousands of other options. Why spend time turning down “friend” requests from spammers when you can talk about what you are really interested in on these other sites? And you can’t leave out the fact that many retail sites that at first glance don’t seem like social networking sites, like Amazon and Etsy , actually have very strong community features to keep users engaged longer and more often.

The situation is simply akin to the development of cable networks and the proliferation of niche broadcast channels. Marketers have had to deal with a constantly fragmented television viewership over the years — why would they think it would be any different online? As the hype wears down, MySpace and Facebook’s numbers will level off and probably see ups and downs. Some new huge player we can’t even imagine will come onto the scene and we’ll all be talking about it. And at the same time, all of these smaller little sites with strong niche affinity groups will continue to flourish.

Welcome to the new normal of the social Web.

Technorati Tags: myspace , facebook , social networking , marketing