Mama Group, the owner of the Mean Fiddler and live music venues including The Forum, Hammersmith Apollo and The Jazz Cafe, has appointed mobile marketing specialist New Visions Mobile to develop its social networking strategy.

The agency, which was behind the development and launch last year of KylieKonnect, a Kylie Minogue-endorsed social networking site, has been tasked with building Wap sites for Mama Group-owned venues as well as collecting, managing and using mobile data to create marketing campaigns to boost ticket sales.New Visions said that it would be creating a number of social networking applications for Mama brands, including the website for music magazine The Fly, music festival Lovebox (in which Mama owns a 25% stake) and venue websites. Activity will enable clubbers and music fans to join online and WAP communities by region, musical genre and venue.

In this Facebook-crazed “era”, it’s interesting to note that Friendster is still alive and well and growing faster than all the rest!

The latest comScore worldwide numbers were just released, and since I occasionally (and selectively) advise organisations on new media strategies, this geek managed to get hold of some inside industry news pertaining to the social-networking space, especially to Friendster which I wrote about earlier.

This month, Friendster seemed to have experienced some exciting growth in terms of numbers and there were also some interesting industry trends. So let’s focus on Friendster for once.

TriCipher today announced
the integration of popular social network sites MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo,
YouTube, Classmates.com, Friendster and others with myOneLogin
(http://www.myonelogin.com), the first Web-based service to combine strong
authentication and single sign- on (SSO), giving customers a secure and
convenient way to access online applications.The addition of these social networks triples the number of major
Web-applications integrated with myOneLogin, just one month after TriCipher
launched the service. Other applications that can be securely and
conveniently accessed through a single myOneLogin account include
salesforce.com, WebEx, Google Apps and Microsoft Outlook Web Access.

“Social networks, like other Web-based applications, have become part
of the work day, and employees use them to communicate with colleagues,
customers, partners and friends,” said John De Santis, TriCipher CEO.
“myOneLogin gives companies the security they need with the convenience
employees want — with a single username and password to securely connect
to third-party and internal Web-based applications.”

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“This time, the emphasis is on tangiable business benefits and any company can participate,” boasts the press release, sounding a tiny bit like the caption for an action movie. Just a tiny bit, because an action move about tangiable business benefits would involve very little action - and quite a lot of watching paint dry.

The press release is for WeCanDo.BIZ - which hopes to provide the next wave of social networking by putting trusted businesses and buyers together, says Ian Hendry, founder and director of WeCanDo.BIZ:

“Facebook, LinkedIn and XING can be used by business people to find new customers, but they are compromised. They require that you work them hard to make the right connections and get yourself promoted; and they often involve you sharing information that may not be appropriate or of interest to people who just want to find a specific quality business to deal with.”

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Trampoline Systems has launched what it claims is the world’s first organisational intelligence and diagnostics tool. Charles Armstrong, CEO of the company, which describes itself as an enterprise social computing pioneer, told Computer Weekly he spent a year in the Isles of Scilly studying village life, to work out why real social networks are so efficient at channeling resources. His rationale was to capture that quality and instil it into automated systems for corporations.

“I’m not a traditional IT person,” said Armstrong. “My background is in ethnography. I wanted to know why villages are so good at getting the right information to the right people, but corporations are so ineffcient. So I spent a year on St Agnes looking at the rules of social networks.”