Ray’s Web 2.0 Business Minitests: Hyves.net, the Dutch Myspace

Add a Comment

November 21, 2006 |

bel3bel

Hyves has been around for a few years now and has grown to the most successful Web 2.0 social networking portal in the Netherlands. In every aspect you can compare it to Myspace.com; it has roughly the same user interface, the same contact management system and you can find people with the same interests (same interest groups are called ‘Hyves’ here) and publish & pimp your blog. If you go there you will notice that it is focused on the 20 million Dutch and Flemish internet users. However you can also choose different languages, such as English, German, Spanish and French in effect making it a global social networking portal.

You understand of course that the bulk of the 2.5 million users are Dutch speaking and everything on it (Blogs, comments) are in Dutch as well.

Nevertheless it has some interesting features & possibilities that Myspace for example lacks. For one, you can use it very successfully as a marketing tool to broadcast your presence. What you do is:

1) create a large amount of ‘friends’ first

2) update your blog very frequently, preferably on a daily basis

ElectionsWhat happens is that every user has a ‘friend-list’ and by merely updating your blog you will notice that you turn-up on top of the friends-list of your contacts.

In Holland there are now elections going on and some politicians have used this tool very successfully. E.g. the current prime-minister (Jan-Peter Balkenende) and the main opposition leaders (Wouter Bos and Mark Rutte) are all in my network (my friends-list) and therefore I could follow their networking progress. Mr. Balkenende has successfully added over 50,000 ‘friends’ so far which enables him to broadcast his blog to this group directly, and to show up on top of 50,000 ‘friend-lists’, roughly containing 6 million people (the average Hyver has more than 100 people in his friends-list). Therefore each day he can be viewed by ‘friends of friends’, which is a group of 6 million people…

No commercial can give you that exposure in the Netherlands and all for free!

So what is happing now is that there are major companies using this and similar tricks in their web 2.0 marketing strategy. Companies such as H&M (clothes) have Hyves containing tens of thousands of members (all exposing themselves to free marketing!). Also cities and non-governmental organizations in Holland use Hyves to reach out to their citizens. The ‘Hyves’ of the city of Amsterdam e.g. also has tens of thousands of members. They use it to keep their citizens informed of upcoming events, create polls about local issues etc. etc… very successfully.

SummaryHyves.net is a Dutch Myspace success-story. It used to be a teenage dating site, having just profiles of teenagers much like Myspace. But now real business is emerging due to the way the system can be (mis)used. This attracts real companies and business people to the Hyves portal evolving it quickly to an essential web 2.0 tool for marketing purposes.

But I have a feeling it will not stop at marketing because government organizations and other NGO’s use it as well now. Very, very interesting…

Key-web 2.0 factor	Points (1-10)	Remarks
1) Manage and view profile	9	Good and easy, video, photo and text. Good interface, you need some time to learn where everything is.
2) Manage contacts	7	Import of contact databases is possible, social networking is not about ‘exclusivity’ of contacts so it is not so important.
3) Communication options	7	Email, they work on IM to be introduced soon. They have just upgraded their hardware to do it.
4) Effective business use	9	Dutch oriented, but very usefull. Be creative!
5) Growing potential	9	Reach out internationally, merge with Myspace without losing your strong features
6) Money making potential	9	It will only grow once IM arrives
Total	50	Verdict: Very good.