First came MySpace, then Facebook, now Kylie Konnect!
By Dave Parrack
Social networks have exploded in popularity over the last few years, becoming more of a dominant force on the Internet. Now it seems they are ready for the next evolution, fan networks built specifically around an individual celebrity.
In the mid Nineties a new phenomenon started to hit the (still young) web, in the form of social networks where people could connect, make friends, and generally socialise online.
It started with niche sites used to trace old friends such as Classmates and Friends Reunited, which started to get noticed but never fully took off due to the closed system where a fee was needed to fully interact with people you knew.
Then MySpace hit in 2003 and the whole thing took off to become bigger than porn sites and even Google itself. Now we have MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, and a host of other general interest and free social networking sites all roughly doing the same thing.
Now it seems, the niche market is getting in on the act and social networks are going to be springing up based solely on one individual celebrity or person. Yes that’s right, if it wasn’t already difficult enough managing all your accounts and contacts on all those sites you signed up while drunk, there are about to be many many more for you to browse.
Kylie Minogue, the Australian singer, has announced the creation of Kylie Konnect, a social network meant solely for her fans to get together and interact with each other. We have had fan sites and forums dedicated to celebrities and musicians for years of course, but this is different in bringing in Facebook type elements in such as detailed profiles, photos, and friend lists.
The big advantage however, and a master-stroke on Kylie’s part is that she will have her own profile page, and can reveal all of the latest news, releases and tour dates to her masses of devotees.
Kylie may be the first, but she’s bound not to be the last, with marketing company ‘New Visions’ promising to unveil more artist specific social networks in the future:
“We’ve developed ‘OurTribe’ which is a user generated content application integrated into our existing WAP platform. Whilst other social networking sites allow fans to create their own profiles online, side loading images and video from their phones to the PC, OurTribe allows users to create and manage their pages directly from their mobile handset. It’s extremely exciting for us to launch this with such a big name artist as Kylie.”
This is an intriguing idea, and although not wholly welcome on my part as I can imagine the barrage of email invites I’m about to receive, very clever marketing for celebrities desperate to keep a large fan base close.
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