Will Multiply Be Fruitful?

A couple years a go there was a new beauty line available from Revlon called Vital Radiance, targeted to the boomer woman who wanted to look HER BEST as opposed to embarking on an endless quest to look 21 again. It was a nice idea, but Vital Radiance is no more.

I have no idea why Vital Radiance is gone. But I bring it up because of a larger question of whether people over the age of 40 want to buy into brands targeted to their age segment. There are examples where boomers and beyond do buy into such ideas – the best I can think of being Centrum Silver, a vitamin designed specifically for the older set. But I can also think of a number of brands where it didn’t work. Quite a few actually. The defunct magazine Lear’s is an example, but there are lots of others as well.

Which brings us to boomer social media. I have been fascinated by this segment of the social networks category since it began. You can picture the VC decks – lots of boomers, they are online, not interested in the “holla holla” apps or being eaten by zombies, big incomes, big disposable incomes, advertisers waking up to their economic power.

It’s quite a story, so it’s no surprise that there a a virtual cornucopia of these sites. Gather, Multiply, Boomj, Boomertown, Rezoom, teebeedee, and gosh knows how many others.

Boomers apparently are stickier than the fickle Duff/Efron generation, according to an interesting post from David Lanzer, Director of the Program on Networked Governance at Harvard.

But we apparently require less jumping from site to site. I say that because most of these sites combine profile pages with photo sharing, blogs, and certain eVite-like features. So these sites are sort of myspecesmeetsflickrmeetsblogspotmeetsevite.

Well , thank the Lord for that. If boomers can drive some consolidation in the number of social application sites, then we will have once again altered the world for the betta.

Another interesting idea from these sites is the concept that their primary role is as a utility to stay in touch with people we already know as opposed to being tools to constantly make new friends and acquaintances. Multiply, for example, offers three tiers of personal networks – close for our BFFs, medium for fair weather friends, and distant for what we from Philadelphia might call “Hey Yo” friends. You know them well enough to say “Hey Yo,” but not to invite to your house or something.

So who’s winning? Multiply seems to be kicking tush so far (see below.)

















So let’s take a walk on the Multiply side.
The Multiply site claims 8 Million registered users. If we assume that 10-20% are active, that’s 800K to 1.6MM. Nothing to sneeze at, not in the same ballgame as MySpace or FaceBook, but pretty good.

Some tasty nibbly bits: You get to select a template for your page.



Pretty! I like this sort of compromise between the DIY MySpace approach (proving why there are decorators in the World) and the Erich Honecker “Ve must haff order!” Facebook white.

Building your page is a breeze. There’s a place for everything. You click and you add.

This attention to experience is not surprising given the backgrounds of the founders.

It’s not just personal pages of course. Multiply has a healthy set of 581 groups in 17 categories. I checked for an Obama group because he has a presence in many social nets, and sure enough, there it was.

From an advertiser's standpoint, it’s IAB leaderboards and towers, and the ads I saw screamed inexpensive network Direct Response. But that’s often true of the social networks, even the giant MySpace. In my view, none of the soche sites have figured the marketing part out yet. And if I were Multiply, I’d hold off on investing a lot in a technology and wait for MySpace and Facebook to find something with traction.

Will Multiply be fruitful? I say that this community will continue to develop. It has some really nice elements and a good intuitive understanding of the boomer’s net sensibilities. And I like any site that lets me make a pretty page in a few minutes.

The challenge will be to get the virality really going. Boomers don't send 200 text messages every afternoon that read...

-------------------------
OMG OMG
*.COM ISC
BFF JIM
-------------------------
Translation:
Oh my God. Oh My God.
Multiply.com is so cool.
Best friend forever, Jim

Another site worth noting is Gather. While less successful so far on the traffic front than Multiply, Gather has some nice features and has been arguably the most effective at getting on the radar of buyers and planners. This site is sort of a cross between Multiply and Divine Caroline (discussed in yesterday’s post) and offers the added feature of gather points that reward participation, blogging, referrals, etc.

Gather also offers a much broader set of advertising features. In addition to banners, they do sponsored content, sponsored sections, paid advertorial, custom icons, and a number of other programs. A very substantial assortment is available.

For Gather, the trick is going to be to get the traffic way up. It’s a challenge in a category this crowded, but they have done an excellent job raising their profile among the media industry, so I wouldn’t count them out.

There’s clearly going to be a winnowing in this segment – there are just too damned many boomer social networks. But I like how these companies have recognized that the boomer is a different breed. We should no more be expected to act like LonelyGirl than we should be expected to join teens in calling American Idol 200 times every Tuesday night. 100 times is all I can manage before bedtime.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to write.