Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

Forrester’s cheerleading squad is now claiming a “groundswell” for social networking advertising in a recession. How so? Marketing on UGC sites is cheap, among other “reasons.” YES, users’ spaces are indeed a cheap ad venue, but for good reason, just ask Google!

Here at Insider Chatter, I have been chronicling the hard battle being waged by social networks to raise the financial stakes in attempting to acquire high-quality, high CPM brand dollars.   

Multiply.com launched almost four years ago to “effectively define the new field of social communications,” according to founder and CEO Peter Pezaris. NOT in the mass media eyes of the 60 Minutes show, however, which recently accorded Harvard drop-out Mark Zuckerberg social media stardom, with not a word about the leading social network MySpace, let alone Pezaris’ Multiply (SEE: Mark Zuckerberg Confirms: Facebook is NO Google Killer).

Pezaris is not deterred, hoever, convinced of the superiority of his own platform.

Last Fall, on the heels of Multiply’s $16 million Series B round, I spoke with newly named Multiply board member, David Scott Carlick, Managing Director of the Digital Media & Internet team of Vantage Point Venture Partners, Multiply investor, and Pezaris, about the site’s plans to “educate” high CPM paying brand advertisers about the value of reaching users in their personally created environments (SEE: Multiply.com Raises Consumer Media Stakes AND $16.6 million VC: INTERVIEW)

I touched base with Pezaris this year to learn about Multiply’s progress. For now, Multiply is focusing on continuing to improve the user experience and plans to launch a premium, subscription service, Pezaris told me.

The Multiply CEO also shared with me how he REALLY feels about the social networking landscape, “We’re still  the only site around that leverages real-life social networks to share personal media, despite what some of our competitors claim,” Pezaris claimed to me.

I asked Pezaris for clarification on his definition of what a “real-life social network” is and to identify which Multiply competitors are falsely claiming to be such social media platforms.

Pezaris explained to me why he believes Multiply is the real social thing, the only one: 

MySpace offers very crude privacy controls which are unsuitable for exchanging personal media in all but the most basic use case scenarios.  Your entire profile on MySpace is either set completely public so that anyone in the world can see it, or completely private, so only your direct contacts can see it.  You have one switch to throw, and it’s either ON or OFF.Contrast this with Multiply, where everything you add to the site has individual fine-grained privacy controls, making the content available extended circles of friends, and friends-of-friends, through trusted, bi-directionally confirmed relationships.

For the exhibitionists of the world, there is no shortage of sites that can deliver your content to a wider audience of strangers –MySpace, YouTube, Flickr to name a few. But none of these sites add  significant value for the “regular guys” like myself who want to share their personal lives with *more* of the people that I actually know in real life, and *fewer* of the people I don’t.

Facebook?  Although you have better privacy controls on Facebook than on MySpace, they are still crude. The world is still binary — either someone is your contact or not.  There is no way to share your media with selected  individuals without first making them a contact of yours. This artificial pressure to add contacts degrades the quality and accuracy of your personal “social graph” over time — anyone who has used  Facebook or LinkedIn has seen these effects.

Multiply, in contrast, allows you to meaningfully and appropriately communicate with tier-2  and tier-3 contacts based on a proprietary “Calculated Proximity Index” system which ranks users in the system in order of how close they are to you in your real-world social graph (this is similar to  how Google’s PageRank works, only applied to social networks).  This recognition that friends-of-friends are important to you for the  exchange of personal media is how we keep our representation of your real-world social circles more accurate.

Multiply’s messaging system is sometimes compared to Facebook’s newsfeed. Some people have referred to the Facebook system as drive-by social spamming, but whatever it is, it’s not suitable for meaningful communication around personal media. Multiply, has an Inbox that combines all of the media sharing and communication that happens within your personal network in one place. You can filter this message-board like application to show you only those items you are interested in, and you can go back in time as far back as you want (unlike Facebook) – want to see all the  videos that have been posted by contacts of yours? No problem. Want to see all the replies to posts you made that you haven’t read yet? Click click done.  Want to see everything that’s being discussed in your extended network of friends-of-friends, including notification where the ongoing real-time discussions are? That’s where Multiply adds *real* value.  And each one of these settings is but a couple of clicks away, and saveable in a personal/private RSS feed, unique to you. On Multiply, not only is there a page 2, we even keep track of when people see what you want them to see.

Pezaris’ bottom MySpace and Facebook line: