Marketers are becoming increasingly cynical about the value of social networks. But many who work in the space say value is defined by what the brand brings to the table -- social networks aren't the mass media buy many thought they were.

With pressure mounting on social networks to find monetization models capable of translating friendship into action, interactive marketers have taken an increasingly harder look at social networks, asking what opportunities -- if any -- they have in the space.

Joseph Dumont, a partner at the interactive advertising firm Questus, posed that question to a group of about 300 digital professionals.

"Recently we heard that MySpace had fallen short of its revenue projects and Google's CEO Eric Schmidt has come out and said that monetizing social networks is a lot more difficult than was originally imagined," Dumont told attendees at the iMedia Agency Summit in Austin, Texas. "Yet social networks account for a huge amount of where people spend their time online, and so the question is how do you come up with a monetization model that works?"

According to Jack Myers, CEO and founder of Myers Publishing and a panelist who shared the stage with Dumont, the answer is one that will have to come from the marketing community, not the social networks.

Asking attendees in the room to stand, Myers took a quick poll to determine how many Facebook users were present. Nearly the entire audience stood.

"If you guys can't figure out how to monetize social networks, then there's a real problem with the business," Myers said. "Right now, we're in the process of moving from a mass communications model where one person spoke simultaneously to many, to a relationship model where marketers are going to need to have deeper conversations on an individual basis."

That means horizontal social networks won't present nearly as much of a value proposition for users or marketers as their vertical counterparts, according to Patrick Keane, CMO of CBS Interactive.

For Keane, horizontal networks like MySpace and Facebook aren't the ideal because their very scale dilutes the niche groups marketers scour the web to find.

"Verticals are where we're seeing a lot of success, especially when it comes to sports and music," Keane said. "You can build opportunities horizontally, but it becomes much more efficient to find them in the vertical space where you're able to leverage a smaller community of intensely passionate users."

But that doesn't mean that sites like MySpace and Facebook should fold their tents, according to Keane. While both vie for the leadership crown in the horizontal social network space, each aggregates a seemingly endless amount of smaller vertical networks within its larger community.

The challenge, according to Navarrow Wright, CEO GlobalGrind, is finding those niche networks.

Wright, who runs GlobalGrind for hip hop legend Russell Simmons, is a man tasked with that very challenge. GlobalGrind, which aims to be a connection point for the larger hip hop community, is betting that it can find a business model based on delivering niche communities and subsets of larger groups to marketers.

"People still want to be connected to like-minded people," Wright told the crowd. "They don't accept random friend requests. The power of the Facebook isn't that it's big, it's that within it, there are tightly connected communities."

But the practical considerations of reaching those communities are still very much in the experimental phase. According to Myers, brands are fully capable of having strong conversations with users in smaller spaces.

"If you're in the mass media business, you don't have the ability to have a conversation and a social network won't give you what you're looking for," Myers said. "But if you understand that brands need to focus on their relationship with users, you see that social networks are well suited to do that."

But Myers offered a word of caution for brands looking for quick marketing hits on social networks.

"Social networks are a lot like a party, and if you join but don't do anything there's still a consequence because you become known as the guy who came to the party and stood in the corner," Myers said.

Michael Estrin is associate editor at iMediaConnection.