SNW INTERVIEW -- Nov 8 -- Gather.com is a social network for grownups. Here’s my interview with their
CEO Tom Gerace. - Mark Brooks
What is Gather’s founding story?
When we launched the company, we focused
both on the technology that creates social discovery and a social conversation
system. We started off with a key set of relationships in public radio and in
publishing to seed the community. We wanted to create a connection between
people and ideas. Our vision for the company has always been to enable people to
have conversations with their friends, family and colleagues around topics that
matter to them. Gather’s goal is to provide a forum for conversations that
matter.
How would you say Gather is different from the likes of Facebook and
MySpace?
First it’s about who is using Gather. We attract an adult audience.
About 30% of our users are in their 30’s, 30% are in their 40’s, 30% are in
their 50’s.
The second thing is that our members are focused not just on the
quick social things like status updates; they’re focused on having a meaningful
conversation and sharing ideas—things that they create themselves. It could be a
photo album, an opinion on something they’ve read in the news, the first chapter
of a book, a poem or a video.
When you get tens or hundreds of friends that
are sharing all the things they find, it really becomes a key way for you to
learn and discover. This phenomenon happens offline all the time; Gather brings
it online. Our friends are key recommenders of movies, our friends shape our
political opinions, and our friends help us to find new products, new
experiences, and new places in the world. We rely on and trust those friend
recommendations more than we do advertising for sure.
Who would you regard as
your competitors?
We think about competitors broadly. Standard social sites
are the biggest competitors. We also see some competition in people trying to
create their own communities around stand alone blogs.
How does the community
make money?
We make money in two ways. We sell standard brand advertising.
Companies like Kraft have promoted multiple brands on Gather, as have Nestle,
Westin, Amtrak and others. And we see the CPG space
growing despite general economic weakness in the financial services
sector.
The second way we make money is through engagement campaigns where
companies engage their prospective customers in a conversation around their
products. We do this through reviews and samplings, which then cascade through
the Gather community. If you get 20 reviewers and they’re connected to 100
people each, their thoughts cascade to 2,000 people. So you get real social
influences and relevant conversations spreading about brands people love. These
engagement campaigns are increasingly popular and it’s something we’re working
to standardize by forming an industry group called the Social Media Advertising
Consortium with a number of media agencies. We are going to standardize what an
engagement campaign means so they’re as easy to buy, monitor, and track as
traditional media campaigns have been.
You have some real hallmark
advertisers. How have those relationships been leveraged into deals which create
awareness of Gather.com?
We engage audiences for our partners by building
experiences on Gather. Audience members engage in a persistent conversation
around topics of interest on the Gather platform. So at FoodTalk. Gather.com
you’ll see a group that exists for the radio show The Splendid Table and it has
about 11,000 people sharing their recipes, trading cooking tips, really
exploring the food space. From time to time that content is integrated into the
radio show. This kind of cross media engagement has a real potential because it
allows large publishers to capitalize on the creativity of their
audience.
What are your goals and plans for the community in 2008 through
2009?
We will continue to build upon our foundation to create an experience
that links people with all of the ideas that their friends, family, and
colleagues are exploring around the country and around the world. As Gather
continues to grow we definitely expect to expand the experience across
platforms. You’ll see us making early investments in mobile. Also we will begin
to organize the content geographically so you can access content that is
relevant to where you live.
