Passion rules the day
A new kind of social network, Fuego Nation, has launched in private beta.
In contrast with socnets modeled after Facebook and MySpace, Fuego Nation is not designed to help users keep in touch with friends. Rather, it is positioned as a way for adults to engage with others who share their interests and passions — many of which are often not shared by friends, explains Brogan Keane, founder and CEO.
The network is organized exclusively around member interests, beliefs and motivating behaviors. Upon signup, each person highlights core interests in a micro profile — called a Passion Card — with a unique jukebox-carousel display. Ads are interspersed throughout:
Other members can find content generated by other users via filter mechanisms on the site, and establish relationships with those that inspire them most. They can use the "Sponsor" feature to express interest in that person and elevate their standing in the community — much like giving a positive rating to a venue on Yelp or a product on Amazon.
Fuego Nation hopes to attract advertisers by touting the communities' scalable and targeted nature. Groups, categorizes, and "passions" are organized automatically, so marketers can easily find their target demographic.
People who are fanatical about high-end fashion, travel, or mountain climbing, for instance, are an ideal audience for particular lifestyle brands to showcase specific products and convey social value and meaning, the company says.
Reception to the socnet has been mixed. CNET wryly observes the site appears to have been "designed around ads." And Profy argues Fuego Nation combines the "best and worst" of social networking's metaverse: taking "a useful social business networking site like LinkedIn and [junking it up] with aspects of juvenile social sites like Myspace or the most annoying parts of FaceBook [sic]."
Social network advertising has been picking up steam in the past few years, but ROI-wise it remains an enigmatic endeavor at best. Over half of CMOs express no interest in incorporating them into marketing strategies.
Statistically, email and blogs have demonstrated much higher conversion rates.
