INNOBLOG

Wal-Mart?s recently announced foray into social networking, ?The Hub,? or ?School Your Way,? seems so incredibly clumsy, forced, and blunt that its success is nearly unimaginable. The site exists in order to sell the uber-retailer?s cool clothes to cool kids. Wal-Mart-loving fashion conscious teens can create profiles that express some personal information, show off hot pics flashing smart ?Mart threads, and even submit video clips that may be made into actual Wal-Mart commercials. The idea is to build brand loyalty and defray the baseless conception that Wal-Mart?s clothes are bland and dasshile promoting select advertisers? products and, perhaps, mining some cool data from kids? profiles. Sounds too good to be true, right? Get this, there?s a catch: all content posted by users to the site will be scrubbed by censors to insure that it meets Wal-Mart?s standards of decency. This seems like a classic example of a large, powerful, and well-funded company attempting to cram into a disruptive space. Often, such efforts are frustrated by the need for different resources, processes, or values in an emerging market. Wal-Mart famously promotes conservative lifestyles, censors media sold in its stores, and forbids alcohol at corporate events -- governing values that seem antithetical to the freewheeling ?hey dude check out these clips of me drinking? world of teenage social networking. Can Wal-Mart?s values (and blatant attempts at self-promotion) fly on the Internet? In order to understand what social networking is all about ? and, consequently, how success can be achieved ? it is essential to understand users? ?Jobs to be Done.? Common wisdom is that teens flock to MySpace and its ilk to express, establish, and play with their identities in a relatively undefined space free of adult influence or meddling. The success of Wal-Mart?s venture rests on this question: how essential is that ?free of adult influence or meddling? bit to the ultimate social networking Job? To many American parents, familiar, ubiquitous and socially conservative Wal-Mart is a whole lot more wholesome and acceptable than MySpace, so, to their kids, The Hub may be to social networking what Christian Rock is to MTV ? an attainable, safe, and ?good enough? alternative. Can ease of access outweigh restrictions on expression on the Internet? In China, certainly, the young are willing to put up with censorship in exchange for access; perhaps getting online is ?good enough,? and freedom of expression is overshot. Assuming Wal-Mart can work out the heavy-handed kinks in its initial design and limit the intrusiveness of its attempts to monetize the site (big assumptions), The Hub figures to be a good barometer for the red state/blue state dynamic among the young and the development of Internet culture in America. Get a load of the fashions at schoolyourway.walmart.com