Running a successful social networking enterprise is no easy task. Heavy hitting competitors spring up overnight as businesses of every kind rush to integrate social networking initiatives into their growth strategies. User retention and loyalty become extremely difficult to engineer, as the social element inherent in all social networks is a curious, inexact science at best.

Social networking in the realm of Internet connected computers is a wondrous confluence of sociology and technology. There are no silver bullets to success, cash can be burned quickly with no sustainable return, legal costs can be prohibitive, and a virtual mob of revolting users can turn even the most thick-skinned CEOs hair gray overnight. On the flip side, building a socnet enterprise from the ground up is arguably one of the most personally rewarding accomplishments imaginable, in many many ways!

As I’ve been able to now delegate a vast majority of day-to-day operational tasks to others, I have been given time to reflect over the hundreds of business principles necessary to create and sustain a viable social networking web site. Every one of these principles has been learned the hard way, and the motivating factor for this blog is for me to share and explore my reflections with other web developers, business owners and socnet aficionados.

WARNING: Building a socnet web space is NOT a good way to make a fast buck. An extraordinary emotional investment as well as every minute of your life is required as down payment (because when you aren’t working you will be thinking about your latest widget, release schedule, support issue, security patch, rogue user, cease and desist or revenue model).

A finely tuned socnet machine will have necessarily mastered some of the most challenging business and IT hurdles with little to no cash to throw at them: business intelligence, capacity planning, code security-stability-scalability, change management, human delegation, risk management, strategic partnerships, impact analysis, disaster recovery, copyright law (fair use and public domain), policy heuristics, usability studies, cross-platform interoperability, parallel architecture, and all that good stuff.

These are the things that I obsess about, and would like to discuss at length – as they relate to social networks.

“You can please some people sometimes but you can’t please all the people all the time.”

Ever hear that adage? You’ve got to understand that as impossible as it may seem, it’s an excuse that you can not live by. You need to literally please all the people all the time… OR ELSE!