People have been saying that places like facebook and myspace are relatively untapped resources of marketing potential on the net, this could be so, but other people have been quietly working on plans of their own to harness the power of the social network.

Nielson, one of the largest market research companies on the planet, has built it’s own social network, it’s currently in beta and only accessible by Nielsen employees but there are apparently plans to open it up to the world at large by the end of September.
The Hey! Nielsen blog actually mentions a mashable article by Pete Cashmere about the site so of course I popped over to check it out, the part that caught my eye was this paragraph:

Why would any normal person sign up for a social network owned by a boring stat firm? Well, one area of the site appears to be the next evolution of the focus group: online panels will be formed and those who participate will get rewards. There’s no mention of money, but prizes will certainly be awarded. Meanwhile, those keen to follow the buzz around products, services and celebrities could stick around.

The reason it caught my eye? Well it all sounds very Ciao! They are a subsidiary of marketing company Greenfield online and so it appears that in this field, Nielsen has been slower to catch on.
In the spirit of full disclosure I should tell you that I have been a member of the site for quite some time, only they pay for member reviews and survey participation, so much so that I actually joined their affiliation program and got this nifty banner in order to recruit other folks:

I know, you didn’t come here to be recruited, you want the skinny on the social networks - but here’s the relevance: Ciao! has a thriving social community based around the thoughts and opinions of their members, admittedly it all happens within the comments; each review is almost like a blog post which the other members can comment on, but this can lead to quite heated debates - especially in the cafe portion of the site.

I admit, I’m interested to see how the Nielsen site stands up to Ciao! But I tend to agree with Pete, the only reason most people would stick around a site like that is financial incentive, no matter what ’social’ functions they provide these will always be secondary to the primary function of gathering information from its members - who wants to be constantly filling out forms in order to be sociable?
My reason for believing this comes from personal experience; I don’t participate in the Ciao! community, I only use the site to add/ read reviews of products in which I have an interest, my social networking happens elsewhere on the net.
Unless the Nielsen site has something quite spectacular going for it I can’t see them making any more headway than Ciao! on the social networking scene. Still, I’ve signed up for an invite and once I’ve had the opportunity to see if they can pull spectacular out of the bag or not, you guys will be the first to know.