There’s an old saw in the technology business which says if you want to make money in a gold rush, sell tools to the miners.

Certainly that’s a formula which worked for Cisco during the Internet explosion of the 1990s, and it seems to be a policy the company plans to pursue with social media. This weekend  The New York Times reporting that Cisco will acquire Tribe.net. The deal is Cisco’s second social media acquisition in a month and suggests that the company plans to sell social networking as an enterprise technology.

The Cisco deals were completed by Dan Scheinman who runs Cisco’s Media Solutions Group. Scheinman told The New York Times that, as much as anything, Cisco’s plan is to “form a relationship with media companies and deliver technology services to them.” So it’s less about helping Toyota turn it’s intranet into a
social network, and more about helping Time Warner Cable offer blogging, video sharing, and the like to subscribers.

Om Malik  is typically skeptical (gosh, he’s more cynical than me!):

Social networks and Cisco pairing is as odd as the relationship between Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton, aka Fembot and the Freak. That didn’t work out, and neither will this.
…

What media companies does Cisco have a relationship with? Last I checked they sold equipment to large corporations, cable companies and phone companies? And those guys – they can’t even get people to use their email!

Joe Duck  agrees with Malik that Cisco’s moves are doomed, but believes the reason is that the success of social networks has little to do with the underlying technology

PlentyofFish.com, a hugely popular dating site, still uses a *single* server and very basic technology despite the fact that it competes with big players working on platforms that probably cost 100x that of PlentyofFish’s.

I think the future will be like the past - successful sites will cater to the needs of people and bend the technologies as needed.   Cisco, Ning, and other social networking technology platforms are great but they won’t define things.   People will do that.

But my guess is that Cisco’s social networking aspirations are doomed by their target audience–media companies.
Big media companies think they are ready to go social, but a comparison between Joost and YouTube is instructive.  Joost, the TV industry’s online video hub of choice, is merely a cable TV style video distributor. YouTube is a community hub with a set of tools allowing all three legs of social media (contribution, participation, meta information generation).  Big media simply is not really ready to embrace the stuff that makes social media so transformative.

When media becomes socially-enabled the source of media’s fundamental value shifts. The intellectual property itself is no longer the thing that drives value, instead, the ability of end users to do something with the intellectual property–tag it, share it, mash it up, comment on it–drives value. Contrary to the RIAA’s belief, a song that you can only listen to is considerably less valuable than one you can share, tag or remix.

Reading a book, watching a movie, listening to the radio, these are the leisure activities that make traditional media entertaining. But posting a video to YouTube, podcasting, or commenting on a blog are the leisure activities that make social media entertaining.

Selling the tools will do Cisco no good unless its clients are ready to use the tools the right way. And if its clients are media companies then Cisco will have to convince them to do what they do best–contribute IP to the community– while allowing the community to do what it will with the IP.

Related links

All Software Should Be Local
Wanted - The Sonos Social Net
Fred Wilson talks with Marc Canter about social software, muses about OpenID, and daydreams about connecting his Sonos system to a social network
Enterprise Infrastructure Industry can Up Business Offering
A look at social networking in the enterprise