Business Plan for SN Guide

Plans for operation and maintenance

SN Guide is a website dedicated to the analysis, categorization, and discussion of online social networking websites. As a free service to its users, SN Guide faces several challenges in supporting itself, both monetarily and as a satisfactorily useful service to its users. What follows is a plan for the operation of SN Guide, detailing the site's purposes, features, target markets, competition, implementation, costs, and projections for the site's future.

1. Overview
   • What SN Guide Is
   • Business Format
2. Costs of Operation
   • Startup and Maintenance Costs
   • Alpha and Beta Phases
   • Normal-Phase Operation
   • Funding
3. The (Distant) Future of SN Guide
   • A Social Network Network

Overview

The multi-million user industry of online social networking is surprisingly unorganized. While industry heavy-hitters such as Myspace and Facebook appear to dominate the social networking scene, there are thousands upon thousands of smaller niche sites whose growth are driven only by word-of-mouth and the occasional stumble from a Google search. As it is detailed in About SN Guide, SN Guide is a directory and archive of analyses, features, and opinion pieces on social networking websites. A primary goal of SN Guide is to provide its users with a comprehensive, up-to-date resource and source of information about topics of interest in social networking. It will help social networking site users to find new sites that surround their areas of interest. Additionally, it will give site designers a forum for discussion and a source to sample various user perspectives in the world of social networking. The site will become community-based, shaped by its users in typical Web 2.0 fashion.
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The community-based approach that SN Guide takes to social networking analysis dictates that the site is offered as a service to users free of charge. Following the model of the vast majority of social networking sites themselves, a community is built using easily accessible and low-cost information.  In order to build and maintain an open and open-ended community of users, and to encourage new users at every point in the website's life, SN Guide must hold its ground as a service that does not require payment of any kind.  SN Guide would not survive if it required a subscriber or user-payment based model of operation, because the majority of potential users would not pay for SN Guide, which is largely based on user opinion, not a definitive and research-based information set.  Losing this client base would compromise the community aspect of the website and thereby hinder its success.
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Costs of Operation

The day-to-day maintenance of SN Guide is potentially substantial. User article submission to the site must be moderated to assure good quality. The site must be updated frequently in order to remain up-to-date. This is necessary because the nature of social networking is very fast-paced and dynamic. Things change quickly on the Internet, and SN Guide must be updated to keep up and stay relevant.

The long-term picture of SN Guide's life entails a self-sustaining community of users spreading workload, updates, and site management among a dedicated core of site administrators. This model is reminiscent of tech-news website Slashdot, which is based on an editorial-blog style policed by moderators as well as meta-moderation, a process by which volunteer users review the correctness of moderation decisions. To get to this point, though, a large community of dedicated viewers must be established. This cannot occur until the website has a sufficient "seed" of starting material and implementation to support rapid growth and user interest.
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SN Guide requires a considerable amount of startup work, in the "alpha phase" of development. Implementing the web technologies and designing the site architecture/visual layout each involve a heavy time cost.  Once a sufficient structure is set up to allow for valuable content, SN Guide enters "beta phase."  Here, the founding members of SN Guide must write a substantial number of "seed" articles and generate a sizeable database for the website directory in order to produce enough benefit to attract a user base.

These stages of initial setup could realistically develop only after weeks or months of research and development, depending on the number of contributing members and their time constraints. In the beta phase, it is imperative for SN Guide to remain harbored in the realm of free webspace so as not to accrue a substantial loss of money.  Small amounts of low-cost advertising in this stage may help to speed up development, but the site cannot rely on this for its growth just yet, because without a wealth of content, keeping a self-sustaining set of followers is unrealistic.  The user-base will likely remain relatively small and dedicated during the beta phase.
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Once a substantial seed has been added to the site to generate a website from which users can derive a benefit, SN Guide can enter the stage of normal phase operation. Here, the site should see its most rapid growth as advertising as well as a move to a more visible and flexible web location (likely its own domain name) will start the process of building the community. At this point, the site will transition to self-sustainability. Volunteer administrators can be appointed to help with the day-to-day operation and moderation of articles submitted to the website.
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In its development stages while SN Guide is hosted by Stanford University's student webspace, the cost of SN Guide is the opportunity cost of the time the site builders spend working on the website. While this time is certainly a precious commodity, it is a loss that cannot be compensated for via fundraising. The time-cost of developing the website is unavoidable, but it could be alleviated with the help of other interested users who wish to contribute.
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This is a rough graph of the site implementation timeline. Note that the time axis is not to scale. This is intended to show the flow of content generation and maintenance throughout the project lifespan (Click image to Enlarge).

Once in normal-phase operation, SN Guide will need to generate monetary revenue in order to pay for bandwidth, a domain name, and other costs of a large-scale web service.  The operations will not cost in excess of $120 per year.  The most likely source for such funding would come from advertisements. The inclusion of banner ads and/or customized advertisements like those offered by Google AdSense would offer a relatively unobtrusive means of funding the site. Research indicates that AdSense advertisements would yield a profit that would easily cover the monetary cost of operations and possibly allow for extra money that could be used to pay for site advertising.

 The inclusion of in-site advertising will not affect the user perception of the website. Most major websites sponsor some form of advertising. Users will tend to accept SN Guide's inclusion of advertising as typical as far as web services go.
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The (Distant) Future of SN Guide

While it is not something that will be immediately implemented, SN Guide could eventually develop into a social network itself! In this stage, SN Guide users would be able to sign up for free membership, then log in using a user-name and password. Once signed in, users would maintain their own profile pages, with which they could

• Post a blog
• Write reviews
• Connect with other users, possibly based on a social networking site recommendation algorithm
• Rank their favorite social networking websites on their own profile pages.

This stage of development is likely a long way off, if it ever develops, but it is one of the more exciting ways that we can see SN Guide evolving. Strangely, there could come a day when SN Guide is able to add itself to its own directory!