Ning–A Community Site In A Box?
Posted by henryhutton on December 13, 2007
As I mentioned a couple days ago, there are several paths to take regarding community implementation and management for your online business. If you don’t want to subcontract out the work (we know building it yourself isn’t the way to go), then you might want to consider a hosted solution. One of the dominant players in this space is Ning. From their site:
Ning offers the latest social networking features, all infinitely customizable to meet your unique needs. The Ning Platform makes this possible. As a platform, you don’t have to appeal to Ning for the features you want. If you have the time and the inclination, you can build them yourself. It’s the software equivalent of Home Depot.
I tried it out, and I must admit it was fairly easy to set up and it seems pretty feature-rich. As an administrator, you have the ability to customize the look and feel, the layout of features, member management, registration questions, and a host of other community-centric items.
So what do you have? You’ve got blogs, forums, groups, photo uploading and sharing, video uploading and sharing, music uploading and sharing, online/offline member status, activity tracking, multiple language management, Flickr importing, site and member usage stats, CSS management and other cool “widgets” and services.
It really is a decent approach to building a basic community around your core online business.
Oh, and did I mention it’s FREE? They do have upgrades that will give you more storage space and bandwidth. When you create a free social network on Ning, you automatically get 5GB of storage for Public Content, 500MB for Private Content, and 100GB for bandwidth. You can also pay to run your own ads, or pay for your own URL or domain. The prices look reasonable if you’re serious about using community to drive traffic and stickiness to your site.
It’s better than relying on Google Adwords to do the same thing.
Furthermore, you have little, if anything, to lose. So yeah, start a community around your online business. Just remember that obtaining and implementing the features and functionality are the easiest part of building a community. Growing, managing, and sustaining a community is where the work is–which is a topic for another day.
Next up–Flux. As powerful as Ning? We’ll see.
This entry was posted on December 13, 2007 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Lulu, community, development, marketing, online business, technology, web 2.0, widgets. Tagged: , business, community, flux, ning, online, widgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
onlinebuzz said
I mentioned Ning on my blog and while it’s good for a few things, it’s really just a hosted social network. The big problem with this is that if you become successful and decide to venture out on your own, all the content you accumulated can’t follow you. The equivalent of Ning before the social network era is hosted forums and may people complained that they couldn’t take the data they built up.
henryhutton said
Thanks, I’ll check it out.
That’s an excellent point, but my guess is that the capability to transfer content and account data will become a feature of these services. Small to medium size online businesses that grow beyond the need for these hosted services would surely pay for this data transfer.