I’m out on vacation this week. The keys to TheKmiecs.com have been turned over to a few, select, awesome guest writers. The following has not been edited by me and is the work and effort of the original author. I appreciate the time and thinking that went into this post and hope you will too. Enjoy!

Despite the noisy dominance of the big boy social networks with millions of users (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and MySpace, amongst others), it’s easy to forget that there is a healthy amount of growth amongst smaller and emerging social networks. These smaller social networks, aren’t quite hitting the fun part of the hockey stick growth curve yet but they are significantly pushing the innovation envelope and are creating exciting new communities of users. Often, emerging social networks are rapidly innovating features to develop niche communities outside the realm of big boy networks that are more intimate, engaged and closer knit. For marketers, it’s an important to be aware of these emerging networks and burgeoning social interactions that could create new and interesting ways of meshing together brand relationships.

Most recently, the relaunch of Virb, yet another social network, is a healthy indication about the overall growth of emerging networks. With around 250,000 users, it’s a tadpole compared to the bigboy numbers but nevertheless, it’s a significant community. TechCrunch has a well written synopsis about many of the changes but most of the improved and relaunched features go about improving the social community of Virb. While many of the features sound identical to what is seen in larger networks, Virb has gone deep to allow all users to extensively customize profiles with full HTML customization. Unlike MySpace, they’ve gone further to allow a viewer to the option to view profiles without any customization. This subtle feature set has allowed a growing base of design oriented individuals and media centric profile users to create a vibrant user community. Without question, these are individuals that probably have a Facebook profile but are supplementing their Virb use to embrace another aspect of their social profile.

Tumblr, a small-short form blog provider, has been exploding with it’s incredibly simple tools to create not just text based blog posts but creative web content. As their purpose of allowing users to rapidly push content outward, they have created another community of users immersed in this world of spreading information and re-sharing information with very low technical barriers. This community is expanding because Tumblr is aggressively providing new features that improve it’s social network and differentiate itself amongst the larger crowd.

Since the teams at Virb and Tumblr are significantly smaller than Facebook, an immense amount of innovation is rapidly churning the platforms that make emerging social networks an exciting development. A particularly simple but innovative feature is Tumblr’s phonecall to audio post which allows a user to call a 1-800 number and leave a recorded message that is automatically uploaded to the tumblr user’s blog. While the concept may ring of novelty, the innovative feature idea separates out Tumblr’s social network of users who rapidly creating content from the Facebook users.

These emerging social-networks are growing because people are finding new purposes for using these social networks amongst their daily use of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and MySpace. For users, there are many new and appealing features and communities to be found in these emerging networks and it shouldn’t surprise anyone if some of these emerging networks turned into an enormous base of users. As many digital marketing efforts have saturated the big boy social networks with effective messages, a great deal of opportunity lies with the emerging social networks like Tumblr, Virb, Veoh, Vimeo, Dopplr, Posterous and targeting specific communities of immersed users and highly engaged individuals.

Johnny Won is a strategist at an ad agency in Boston. He runs on Tumblr johnnywon.com and uses Twitter @johnnywon to keep track of his poor memory.