Are white-label mobile social networks from Wadja a bridge too far?

 

Wadja.com announced today that it will be providing a white-label service for brands (or anyone else, really) to create their own mobile social network. Built on Wadja’s platform, the social network would be fully branded for the client. The platform allows a variety of ways to access the network, including SMS, mobile Internet and even desktop - but is a glut of social networks really going to do anyone any good?

This service offers everything you might expect from a mobile social network - profiles, shortcode updates, direct messaging, some free SMS, etc. It also allows for multimedia storage and sharing, which is nice. The Wadja platform includes it’s MessageAds service, which inserts keyword-targeted text ads into free SMS.

From the release:

Alex Christoforou, Founder and Managing Director of Wadja, said: “By providing brands with a fully customised social media platform, brands can better understand their audiences and build a community of advocates that both caters for existing customers and attracts new ones. What Wadja is doing is totally unique: offering a comprehensive white label mobile social network. For marketing teams, this takes social media outreach to an entirely new level, quickly and easily. By retaining various channels for monetising the service, it can even become a source of revenue.”

What we think?

Everyone likes social networks, but they’re becoming too much of a buzzword phenomenon. Everything has to come with social networking integrated these days, even if it’s not particularly suitable. Creating a mobile website? I guess you should throw some social networking in there - it looks good on the shareholders report. In fairness to it, Wadja is making good use of this trend while it can. By making it as easy as possible for companies to create their own social networks, it’s tapping a nice little market. Will any of these branded social networks do any good, or even survive? To be honest, it doesn’t really matter. A proliferation of little networks won’t make any difference to the big boys like Facebook, Twitter or Bebo.