TeamSugar Launches Social Network for Women

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Another niche social network arrives. TeamSugar, which launched officially today (although it has been live for a few weeks), is a spin-off of the Sugar Network, a series of blogs that seem to target fashion-conscious women. The most popular is PopSugar, where celebrity gossip is the pressing issue of the day.

But this isn't your typical MySpace wannabe - TeamSugar is all about promoting the company's existing content and allowing a community to form around it. Due to tight integration with the blogs PopSugar, DearSugar, TeamSugar and FabSugar, users can quickly switch between the various sites and see the most recent content on each one. That's a smart piece of marketing. And obviously TeamSugar has all the standard features, too - you can add users to your friends list, see when other members are online, leave comments, send messages, write a blog and take part in polls.

There are lots of these niche networks springing up at the moment - MommyBuzz, Elhood, NHLConnect, MuslimSpace, MOG, MyBlogLog, Imbee and Project Opus, to name but a few. However, I don't think TeamSugar is just another niche community. Instead, it's something much more valuable - social networks as a marketing tool.

TeamSugar's effort is great, but this form of social marketing can go horribly wrong if done incorrectly - WalMart's MySpace clone is a classic example.

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