Adweek reports that CondeNet has done a 180 on its effort to target teen girls through social media. Less than a year old CondeNet launched its own social network site Flip.com.
Well 11 months later Conde Nast is reversing course and is converting Flip.com into a series of applications that will live on social networks, starting with Facebook.
“It’s hard to carve out enough time from those girls [because of] Facebook,” said Sarah Chubb, president of CondeNet. “Why fight it and try to build your own social network when there is one that is open to things being built on top of it?”
By abandoning a destination strategy, CondeNet expects that the Facebook-centered strategy will reduce overhead to 25% of what is required for a destination site.
“This is an attempt to get in front of user behavior in a particular demographic,” she said. “I think the imperative for all of us trying to make a business of this is to figure out how to get traction in a distributed world.”
This is an interesting move by CondeNet. The buzz word for 2008 is niche site and more people are talking about moving to smaller more focused social sites than moving to the big social networks.
CondeNet gave Flip.com less than a year to succeed. At its peak Flip.com attracted 300,000 users a month. I wonder whether this will be a good move for CondeNet to give up its own site and join Facebook. Facebook is a huge site, but I don’t think that it is a major destination for teenage girls. CondeNet might save money by moving to Facebook, but I think this is a short-sighted move and that they will fail in their efforts to reach out to teenage girls are going.
While Facebook may not have been the right choice I think, on the whole, it is better for companies to join existing social networks than it is for them to create their own. Unless it is a brand that seems to naturally attract customer loyalty (Apple or Dell, for example), it seems like you’ll be more successful going where the audience already is, than trying to convince them to come to you.