iMedia Connection - ad:tech blog

Driving traffic is one of the most challenging, yet important goals facing social networks and other online communities.  However, if you have the developmental resources, you may want to focus on an additional strategy – weaving social trust features into an otherwise generic infrastructure, delivering new levels of safety and security to users.
The industry is saturated with social networking sites these days.  While most cater to specific groups based on interest, demographic, etc., the structural features are mostly the same. What many of these networks are missing is a way to validate members with social trust guidelines.  Social trust refers to the personal real-life connections between members of online communities.  Many social sites encourage users to connect with their "friends."  However, over time, users tend to collect hundreds, sometimes even thousands of so-called "friends." What they need now is a way to better describe, display and link the nature of these connections.  This helps users understand whether their "friends" or other peoples' "friends," are really complete strangers or worse, scammers.  
I encourage you to ask yourself the following questions to understand the level of social trust your network currently provides:  
1.  How are "relationships" defined?  Is there a way to... Read more

One of the underlying, and often problematic, aspects of many popular online dating networks is that these sites typically guarantee members a certain level of anonymity.  While this invisible barrier can be touted as a powerful online safety standard, it can leave members vulnerable to spammers and scammers.  How can a dating site guarantee that a profile picture or bio is real?  How can you trust anyone you interact with online, at all?  Most dating sites only guarantee anonymity, something that the concept of "social trust" can "guarantee" to improve.  
Social trust first came on the web scene in 2002 with Friendster, the granddaddy of social networking sites and the original platform used to connect.  Since then, the social trust model has become an inherent element of a variety of niche market networks.  Yet perhaps no other industry can be more affected by the implementation of social trust than the multi-billion dollar online dating industry, which has long been plagued by fake profiles and scam artists.
Based on real-life personal connections, the goal of social trust networks is to allow users to expand their social circles online through friends of friends.  Then they can make recommendations, find content or interact with... Read more