Journey through the German School Social Network Landscape
I just came back from an interesting journey through Germany, meeting with three rising school-student networks (btw, I also met with René who will soon release a very nifty university tool – more about this in a later post).
SchülerVZ is producing news with porno-images and nazi-groups on their network – but their growth in profile counts profile allows them to enter cooperations with search engines such as yahoo. Is there no room anymore for other social networks?
The journey convinced me that there’s more to German social networks than the Facebook-clones StudiVZ and SchülerVZ. Last week I met with Sebastian from Schueler.cc in Friedberg, a small town north of Frankfurt. I also met with Jasco, Klaudia and Florian from Fellowweb.de in Vallendar, a university town in the Rhine-Valley. Last but not least I met with Manuel and Bernd from Spickmich.de in their hometown Cologne.
Many Davids vs. two Goliaths?
The overall question was: Is there a chance for small or medium-sized networks in the field of students and pupils, even with the two big communities piling up profiles. The answer is: Yes, there is lots of space for innovative ideas – but no space for cloning successful ideas anymore.
Currently about 25 social networks are fighting for the attention of German students and pupils. Most of them are primarily targeting university students. StudiVZ.de, Unister.de, studylounge.de are directly aimed at students, other networks like gotfriends.net, lokalisten.de are aiming at young people below the age of 30.
Foreign social networks like Facebook and Myspace are becoming increasingly popular among German students. The large homogenous group of university students is well connected across universities and disciplines. They allow networks to grow fast once the “tipping point” of five to ten percent of total students per university is reached.
Fractured market of high school student
On the high school level, the situation is very different. Schools are smaller and less connected among each other than universities. There is less exchange between students from different schools. The relevant target group of teenagers aged 13 to 18 is considerably smaller than the target group of university students of 18 to 28.
But a few social networks have managed to successfully invade this market. StudiVZ has released its little-brother-project SchülerVZ. It seems to be based on the same program code as StudiVZ and it seems to be running in the same database on the same server(s), but only the Tech-Team can say more about this and I have no doubts that this is the last thing they would do. But it seems that SchülerVZ (like its bigger brother) spends much more effort on viral marketing than on close community observation.
A number of smaller communities, such as Schuelerregister.de, Schueler.cc, Fellowweb.de or Spickmich.de, have gone a different way. Instead of relying on large marketing campaigns, they offer some attractive features for school students.
The importance of a close community
Schueler.cc is based on the “class” as smallest unit of network. Unlike American high-schools, divided into age groups like freshman, sophomore, junior and seniors, German high-school students are organized into groups of 20 to 30 fellow students with whom they share the core classes, such as Math and German. At each age level several of these classes exists per school.
In Schueler.cc, the school students can use a class blackboard for their personal messages. These small groups can easier communicate among each other in these closed groups than bigger groups based on membership in school (for instance the way that SchuelerVZ is organized). At Schueler.CC users can identify profiles of fake-users that have camouflaged themselves within a class. These fake profiles can then be deleted from the database real quick.
Schueler.CC has hired an ad agency to sell ad space on their network. While income is maybe not as high as SchuelerVZ, Schueler.cc can use its income to cover expenses for technical support and, even more important, maintain a closer community interaction than any other network in Germany. The result is a more integrated and more accessible school student community which might turn out to be better platform for advertisers. Especially if advertisers are not interested in a large chunk of profiles containing lots of fake profiles, but real users which use the site continuously, Schueler.cc might give the better offer.
Link between employers and students
Only a short jump from Schueler.cc, Fellowweb.de has opened its windows to the school students. It is the smallest but also the newest network for school students in Germany. This community links pupils, students and young professionals. It wants to provide the ultimate answer to one of the most pressing questions for school students: “What do I do after I graduate from high-school?”
Users can provide their current and previous employments and internships. This alone wouldn’t mean much, but fellowweb features another nifty tool. Users can indicate their personal characteristics or favorite working environments, such as working with people, working outside, crunching numbers or planning projects. These two features provide a powerful tool for helping school students matching their personal preferences with possible career paths of other users.
The managing trio of fellowweb are trying to conquer a very interesting slice of the school students market. This slice, career guidance for school students, is much underestimated in its value. Unlike US-High-Schools, career guidance counselors are unheard of in many secondary schools. The school-students and their parents are left alone when facing the increasingly tough choice of selecting a proper education or a promising career path. On the other side of the table, companies are having a tough time identifying good recruits. Fellowweb is the shuttle between two worlds – helping companies finding skilled students, helping students finding their career path in life.
Both felloweb and schueler.cc are networks that only work because their community is much closer and more integrated than others. The same is true of Spickmich.de, a social community that had a larger impact on education politics than many school reform initiatives.
Power to the students
Spickmich allows students to grade their teacher. They can examine looks, teaching abilities, fairness, humor and other talents of the teacher. At the end of the school year, students can print the grade report of their teachers and a school report of all their staff and other characteristics of the school.
Spickmich assigned a minimum number of votes to detect biased voting. However, teacher’s unions in Germany were outraged by the perspectives of being graded by school students. They sued Spickmich.de, but the case was turned down recently because the expressed opinions were covered by the freedom of speech-principle in the German constitution. This seminal decision in internet law has the ability not only to drastically change the environment that school students network are working in, but also to change the relation between teacher and school students.
All three networks feature new ideas and maintain independent networks because of their innovation – even though the larger networks have already quite some profiles. In the next couple of weeks, I will write more about each community and will also try to meet with other communities in Germany.
Oktober 5th, 2007 at 17:37
Fingers crossed for all the David`s in Germany.:)