– I think of Facebook as more of an ‘owned social network’ – in that your traffic and interactions with people essentially are owned and gated by Facebook. They facilitate you entering into other people’s networks and creating a larger one if possible.

– I would go further to add to the ‘people buy from people’ and say ‘people buy from people they like’. People like people with similar interests, that’s why music sharing works so well. Take for instance the band All Mankind(.net) You’ve probably never heard of them before, they’re a rising Aussie band. But if I said their producer worked on artists like Sting & Elton John, they sound like U2, Crowded House and have influences like Pearl Jam – then you would more likely assess them on your similar/dissimilar interests (StumbleUpon connects people like this). That’s the good thing about these so called social networks, they provide the framework for us to assess each other and connect more easily and ‘like’ each other before we like each other.

– Not sure if I read it already or not but as with any business it takes time to build and get a social network of your own. That’s a part of being human and I think it’s a really good thing. Get over the novelty indeed! To really work it well – I think longevity and constant activity will really work a lot better in the long run.

Consumers have only 2 possibilities: consume, don’t consume. Anything you can do to make the consumption happen is fair game.

But the twist is… no one is a consumer. We share, too … whether we tell a friend or post it on Facebook. And some produce too, in terms of extending a business’s impact even further.

When you take the “anything is fair game” consumer approach to these people, you screw it all up.

And you have it nailed on the head by naming it “respect”.

Once you realize that something becomes viral by being interesting enough to be passed between individuals, is when you realize that you’re speaking to real people and your messages need to respect that in order to be successful.

And you’re so right that WOM is as much a mystery as social networks. Maybe that should be another topic in it’s own right, though there are much better minds than mine covering it at length (Andy Sernovitz and Seth Godin come to mind).

Glad we agree on #4 and #5. Have any rules of your own?

Sure, it’s not a network, it’s a tool for maintaining and expanding them through the internet. But most net based tools are metaphors, at best, for what you do in the real world. They are approximations of concepts that often have no physical analog in the real world.

That being said, I’m not sure most people get WOM either, but I guess explicitly drawing that connection is quite valuable to people who still see facebook, twitter, etc. as some sort of mythical marketing machine.

ok – end rant.

I totally agree with 4 and 5, two of the biggest things that many companies are missing the boat on.

/Adam