Social Wave is an online service designed to help Silicon Valley develop stronger communities by creating opportunities for residents get to know other locals, businesses, and their area both online and in person.

Social Wave is a Social Enterprise

A Social Enterprise is a business whose operational goal is to achieve financial sustainability while serving the common good by using innovation in business to address a sociological problem that negatively affects the community. Social Enterprises do not have to be non-profits, but any surplus generated is returned to the community through additional services or direct contributions. The purpose of a Social Enterprise is defined by the problems that it's designed to address. In the case of Social Wave, the problems addressed are social isolation and its role in the decay of sustainable local economies.

• Society has become highly mobile in all aspects, leading to the degradation in the quality of traditional community life because natural social networks require stability and take time to form. Radical changes in industry as we've seen in the past two decades produce large scale economic migrations which negatively impact the quality of community life in places where people leave and in the places where people follow jobs to.
• Sustainable locally owned businesses are more difficult to operate in fractured communities because natural social networks are part of the economic relationship people have with the businesses around them. While price competition pressure is likely the most significant factor in explaining the troubles of small locally owned businesses, it does not account for the entire range of challenges facing them. Any expert online shopper knows that large online retailers have great expertise in making buyers pay for their discounts in the long run.
• Information networks such as the Internet were once hailed as the great equalizer, but end up serving the purposes of dominant brands instead of local economic interests. Without focused application, Internet services tend to favor entities with the most marketing power, the farthest reach, or the loudest voice because the Internet is completely geographically agnostic.

Social Wave operates under the belief that problems with fractured communities and weak local economies are highly related and the best way of solving them is to address them together. A highly fractured community will be less engaged with local merchants because small locally owned businesses traditionally rely on social connections such as word of mouth or reputation to survive. In a fractured community, strong corporate branding becomes a surrogate for the trust relationship that people may otherwise develop with local businesses. This relationship can be developed through direct experience or through word of mouth.

In another time, there was a direct relationship between social interaction and the local economy. The need to go downtown for goods, services, and information was a primary driver of community interaction. Downtowns (and similar districts) have since become obsolete as essential commercial hubs, but still possess high potential to be the centers of social interaction that help make real communities possible. Information tools can help direct residential attention toward community centers, but so far has not served the interest of the local community well.

It was once believed that the Internet would level the playing field between big and small organizations because it amplified the power of word of mouth. Years after the euphoria that led to this utopian proclamation, the Internet seems to have ultimately tipped the balance of power further to the side of large corporations that have unmatchable resources to spend on reinforcing the power of their brand. Because the Internet as it exists today is a decentralized medium with no bias to geographic location, it is less a conduit for traditional word of mouth (which is based on social connections) than it is a revolutionary conduit for large scale phenomenon.

The problem is compounded by the fact that many locally owned businesses do not even have a website and the ones who do often don't have competent sites. With high quality local information so difficult or impossible to get online, people will be reluctant to test the potential for using the Internet to find information that they need to connect with their community economically and socially. A focused service like Social Wave can help repair fractures in the community by facilitating the development of social connections between people and by making more high quality local information accessible online.

Many services have been launched that help people develop their social lives. There's hundreds upon hundreds of them in the form of online dating sites and social networking sites, but none of them tie in directly to the local economic infrastructure. Without a socioeconomic connection, these services can at best succeed in benefiting a small percentage of participants, but will never be an effective way of achieving broader community. By unifying a range of popular types of online information and networking services with an innovative approach toward supporting locally owned businesses, Social Wave hopes to improve upon the efforts of its social networking service siblings and stimulate long lasting improvements in the overall quality of community life.

• Merchant Profiles: Overview of Social Wave Merchant Profiles
• How Social Wave Helps You Meet Your Community