A company in Dubai has been tipped for a massive impact on the white label social media scene. Two year old start up H2O New Media is causing a bubble of activity within social media circles. White label social media is not a new concept, in fact there over 30 white label social media players in the industry. H2O in contrast seems to have a very different approach to their white label applications that are focused very heavily on how publishers actually make money from their social media assets rather than delivering funky new widgets.

They announced an e-coupons OEM platform last month that uses location based services technology, an article in Digital Production Magazine Middle East stated that H2O had already worked out how to deliver location based coupons to users when they were walking past a store for example. If that's the case then it seems as though H2O seem to have a significant capability in social media data correlation, certainly that's the background of their founder - if its true it could be that H2O start to provide white label social media applications to smaller individual or currently traditional print publishing groups that actually drive social media revenue by using data correlation to deliver highly targeted and time sensitive advertising.

Certainly this would bring a sigh of relief to companies struggling to work out exactly how they will make money from their social media assets. Publishers don't make any significant money from search, a market that's pretty much dominated by Google & Yahoo so their next option is to start utilizing demographic data and applications functionality combined to drive relevant high value advertising with their social media assets.

If H2O have cracked data correlation to be able to work through the myriad of social media data it could be that the Middle East will see its first technology powerhouse develop. All traditional publishers are currently wrestling with the "monetization" question. If H2O have technology that will correlate user actions on social communities together with location information, user advertising preferences and advertisers offers it could be sat on a Gold Mine the size of Google's.