Marketing has its 4 Ps -Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. In order to channel the energy of social networking to serve businesses and those who mean business, consider these Ps of online communities; Privacy, Pre-wired, Purpose, Process, and People.

Privacy – all that openness is great, except when it comes to my business.

Pre-Wired – everyone can get to work tomorrow, and pretty things up as we go. While social networks can "emerge" - we need everyone working, NOW!

Purpose – social networks are fueled by people pursuing their own purposes, still mostly to find a party, find a date, find a prospect, or find a job. Online communities serve the shared purposes of the community as a whole and groups within the community, hopefully in part powered by people finding their own personal or professional purposes served. The less they are, the more investment needs to be made to catalyze people to participate – the activation energy.

Process - Great. Everyone can interact with anyone on anything. Every CEO, CFO, and investor out there – besides the ones making money helping people find a party, find a date, find a prospect, or find a job – is asking, “are they getting any work done?” Sure the energy is there, so is the Sun’s. But, until we learn to capture that energy and focus it with predictability, manageable risks, and demonstrably improved returns, that energy will remain elusive. Online communities need processes and decision making discipline in order for the B2B investment in these technologies to take off.

People - While many technologies are focused on mining data and documents, leaders readily admit that most (I've heard 80%) of the knowledge of any organization is in the head's of people. And, I'm pretty sure that is where 100% of the assumptions are that people use to base decisions. Private online communities offer the means to harness the many-to-many energy of social networking, integrated with group process and decision making tools, to enable people to engage each other in accomplishing shared purposes.