This blog will be used to discuss issues, questions, concerns and ideas dealing with a wide range of topics, relating to The American Legion. As National Legion College Graduates, we hope you will utilize your knowledge of The American Legion to engage and challenge your fellow graduates. We hope you will lead this organization to face the challenges ahead. There are no formal guidelines to how to blog. We encourage everyone to comment.

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Wednesday, April 29, 2009

How to start a good social network for veterans:

I hear a lot of ambitious people wanting to start a social network these days to “provide transitional service and connect the veteran community”. While I admire their initiative and desire to help, often they lack the knowledge of what social networking really is and don’t know how to really tap the potential of social networking and employ the power of social media and new media.

One example:

I recently received a call from CPT “Socialnetwork Champion” to discuss his social network for the Marines. I asked a few questions about his desires, and this is the facts I collected:

• They have a brief market analysis and have determined that their targeted audience should be Marines and Veterans age between 18 and 35.
• They want to provide transitional services to these veterans.
• They have lined up one headhunting company to provide this employment service.
• They want to provide a matching feature to connect Marines with potential mentors and employers.
• They want to provide a vehicle of communication for active duty Marines and veterans.

I think what they have so far is great, but here are some problems:

• Their market research is incomplete and failed to capture the growing market share in Baby Boomer generation that encompasses the Vietnam generation veterans.
• If they do not target the older generation then how are they to provide the matching service for young veterans? Just peer-peer will not get them the experience and institutional knowledge our older veterans have with regards to the VA and other processes necessary to ensure a successful transition.
• Their identified goal of providing transitional services is too general. There are just too many issues for any one person to tackle. Transition means anything from PTSD support, to financial services, to family life mentoring, to job placement, to social reintegration. If a social network does not identify and target a function to provide a service, users may be distracted and do not recognize the things that makes your social network unique. The point here is that social networking is like any other competitive market, where you have to offer something new and useful in the product you are trying to deliver to ensure users return. Social networks are nothing if you don’t have users and no one is coming back for a unique service and/or function.

If you are thinking about using a social network to connect and provide a service to our veterans, here are some of the things to think about to ensure your success:

• You need to identify your targeted audience. Be as precise as you can and cast your net as wide as you can. What you may need to do is to segment your audience types and by demographic. Once you have that, then do your market analysis to determine just what the needs are in each segmented section and determine the services and function you can provide to that section.
• Then you have to carefully determine the risk and return on your investment on each of the sections of your segmented audience group. If you are providing a peer-peer support service to women veterans, then you need to determine what competitive edge you have, is there a existing social network providing the exact thing? Also keep in mind that the functions you decide must meet a need and has to depend on your Voice of Customer analysis. So you may want to do a small online survey to see just how many people may be interested in getting online peer support for VA home loan process (or whatever else you have identified). What you don’t want to end up with is a high price function, connecting Marines with golf courses that provide discount to veterans, that only serves a small population and is not demanded by users on the social network environment.
• Also you need to design a functional process that your social network will adopt and practice. You must always identify key input variables and output variables of that functional process so you can improve on this process int eh future depending on user input.
• You must identify all open-sourced social networks and see if any of them can provide what you wish to accomplish before you decide to spend a few million dollars on tech cost. A lot of times software companies will sell you on things that they know won’t work because they know the exact same function is being performed by Facebook or Boomj. But they will sell you the software solution anyhow just to make money off you. So do as much as you can open-source, and host only critical information on paid technology. I recommend that database functionalities are a must pay service since that allows you to collect user data for your own segmentation and targeted marketing.
• And lastly, know your users and keep up on your users. Drive your users to your site. Your social network is nothing without users so don’t focus too much on the technology and forget your users…