NOT a photo of the author.

I recently fell prey to the marketing campaign staged by Classmates.com. You know…the site that purports that they will help you reconnect with all the friends you had in high school.

Balderdash.

It turns out, Classmates.com is (as far as I can tell) a complete waste of time – unless you pony up for the monthly membership charges for their “Gold Membership” package. Now tiered membership levels are nothing new. Lots of social networking sites do something similar. However, other social network sites with dual-level memberships actually give you something of value at the “free membership” level.

Robert Metcalfe (founder of 3Com and inventor of Ethernet) identified what’s come to be known Metcalfe’s Law: The value of a network increases exponentially with the number of users connected to the system. In other words, with every additional registered user of a social network, the value of the network increases exponentially. Therefore, the more users Classmates.com can acquire, the more value their site has. Unfortunately, Classmates.com seems to believe that this “value” is a one-way street…as a user, you get literally nothing of value at the “free” level.

Logic would dictate that, in order to entice users to sign up, you’d want to give them something of value. For instance, sites like LinkedIn.com allow users to add other contacts in a sort of “Six Degrees of Separation” fashion – you have to know someone who knows the one you want to contact, in order to make an introduction. Sans that, you have to pay to play. Fair enough.

Classmates.com, however, is a different story. Sign up, and you’ll get an incessant flow of emails, helpfully informing you that “Three people signed your guestbook last month.” When you click on the link they so helpfully provide, you see three names – blurred out. In order to read the messages or find out who sent them,  you must upgrade to their Gold Membership package.

I predict a very short lifespan for Classmates.com, unless they change their policies. I know of at least three people, apparently people I know who are trying to get in touch with me, who will not hear from me, as I refuse to play Classmates.com’s little reindeer games. I didn’t like extortion when I was in high school. I don’t like it now. Unfortunately, it looks as if the high school nerds that were picked on back in the day are having their revenge, by making the same errors in judgement that the bullies made then. Too bad. The site is a great idea, and if they had the right business model, could be a very attractive venue for advertisers and marketers.

But not for me. I’m not interested in pay to play.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 12:03 pm and is filed under marketing, media.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.