Ning–A Community Site In A Box?

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.

The “Community Question” for Business–Build, Buy, or Join?

The “Community Question” haunts almost all companies with an online presence, and shapes both our day-to-day and strategic approaches to eventual success. Furthermore, there’s no doubt that online communities are the life-blood of today’s ecommerce sites–eBay, Amazon, and Lulu (where I work) depend on their communities for feedback, return traffic, repeat business, site stickiness, viral marketing and brand reinforcement. Your community is your strongest asset and staunchest ally. Be kind to your community because, in truth, it’s not your community. They own you, and will quickly turn on you if you slight them.

But, for better or worse, your online business definitely should have a community around it (see where community ranks in “Top 10 Things To Do As a Startup“) . A strong, dynamic, and exciting community is a significant competitive advantage and serves as a barrier to entry for others trying to gain traction in your space–especially in new markets.

On the other hand, building a successful enterprise requires focusing on your core strengths, i.e. those specific efforts that will deliver superior products or services for your market. Unless you’re like Flickr or YouTube–that is, depending on ad revenue or social network effects–your core strengths will not be community technology. As a matter of fact, companies (large or small) can easily get distracted by spending development cycles on important, yet non-critical, community platforms and infrastructure.

Avoid the temptation. There’s no need for you to build a better blog, a better profile management system, a better photo arranger, or a better widget. Why? For one, you’ll always be behind the curve because this isn’t your space. You didn’t hire your engineers to be experts in this field, and they’re not. Two, you’ll never know which one of the top 20 widget functionalities you’ll need–which will add the most value, and there’s a good chance you’ll pick the wrong one. Three, by the time you pick one to work on, and even if it is the right one, before you deploy it there will be 20 more newer cool applications to emulate. You’ll get distracted. In essence, you’ll catch yourself looking at every pretty girl (or every cool community app) that walks by while your competitors are focusing on the “one thing” (whatever that is) that brings success in your market.

So what’s a company to do to take advantage of the community phenomenon?

There are two paths, actually.

* Subcontract the development: If you can’t avoid the NIH (“If it’s Not Invented Here we won’t use it”) approach and decide to build your own community tools, then subcontract these efforts through an external engineering house to meet your specs. But don’t spend your key development resources on this project.

* Buy, Rent or Join “off the shelf” community platforms: This option was the primary reason for writing this post to begin with, but I caught myself needing to post the preamble above. But recently there have been several compelling “community in a box” hosted applications that have caught my attention–namely Ning, Flux, and Wetpaint, which I’ve been investigating. At this point each deserves it’s own separate post, so we’ll start with Ning tomorrow.

Google—mobile content here we come.

Google, always one to take the high road to “do no evil,” has once again shaken up the world of information delivery by announcing a new mobile application platform. From their blog:

“What we are announcing — the Open Handset Alliance and Android — is more significant and ambitious…In fact, through the joint efforts of the members of the Open Handset Alliance, we hope Android will be the foundation for many new phones and will create an entirely new mobile experience for users, with new applications and new capabilities we can’t imagine today.

I don’t know about you, but the entry of Google into the phone device space is even more disruptive than Apple’s iPhone introduction. Where Apple tries to move the market forward, Google tries to create new markets with revolutionary and innovative approaches. They build the foundation for others to build upon, while Apple strongly controls external development.

Although you might think they’re entering from the ground level, that’s not necessarily true. Google has several mobile-ready apps up and running (Gmail, Google Maps) that might surprise you.

More about Android:

Android is the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications — all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation. We have developed Android in cooperation with the Open Handset Alliance, which consists of more than 30 technology and mobile leaders including Motorola, Qualcomm, HTC and T-Mobile. Through deep partnerships with carriers, device manufacturers, developers, and others, we hope to enable an open ecosystem for the mobile world by creating a standard, open mobile software platform. We think the result will ultimately be a better and faster pace for innovation that will give mobile customers unforeseen applications and capabilities.

Recent trends indicate that the mobile device is becoming the new PC. Optimizing content delivery over mobile devices is the next challenge, although content creation over mobile devices is the holy grail (books, photos, videos, etc). We’ve already had mobile book published through Lulu, and that’s happening more and more.

Google is well-suited to be a player in both, and we’re in for some excitement in this space.

Lulu Community activities need to look like Flickrvision and Twittervision.

You gotta check out Flickrvision and Twittervision. As top 100 community sites, Flickr and Twitter obviously have a lot going on, and Flickrvision and Twittervision display this community activity via Goggle’s Google Earth functionality.

Wow.

It’s really cool seeing photos that users are uploading in real-time, or twitter comments being presented as they occur. I, for one, could watch it all day.

This has real possibilities for displaying activities from Lulu’s dynamic community, too. Whether we’re showing the 1000+ new creators we have registering every day, or displaying the book cover image of newly published content by geographic location, or showing an image of the content that’s being purchased, there are opportunities to better convey “World Lulu” to creators and visitors alike.

Let me know what you think. I’m at henry@lulu.com.

hbh

Lulu now has social tagging

It’s taken a while, but we’ve finally taken an important step at Lulu.com. Lulu creators, their audience, and internet lurkers in general can now “tag” Lulu content for wider internet visibility. If you go to any Lulu marketplace item, say Bylli Crayone’s Court of Love mp3, you’ll see Digg and del.icio.us icons and links. In a nutshell, these two popular internet sites provide a means for you to market your Lulu content outside of Lulu–which is good for everyone!

As a primer, check out these links to better understand the value of these features:

• What is Del.icio.us? What is social bookmarking? What are “tags”? http://del.icio.us/about/
• How does Digg work? http://www.digg.com/how

You might also want to view their FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions):

• Del.icio.us’s FAQ
• Digg’s FAQ

Lastly, to post on these sites you need join them!

• Join Del.icio.us
• Join Digg

I hope you take advantage these new capabilities bring for maximizing the online reach of your content, and widening your audience. Enjoy!

hbh