Social Community Platforms

As the shift in audience engagement and participation swings from in-person interaction to online involvement, organizations of all means and sizes have gone social.

It’s more than a Twitter feed…a blog…or Facebook fan page. Rather, niche social networks for nearly every fancy are now live and welcoming new members.

Even with the commercialization of the market-leading Ning platform, there are a number of free, easy-to-use applications for online community construction:

Grouply

Grou.ps

Flux

Groupsite

BuddyPress

Spruz


For marketers, participation in these groups allow for audience micro-targeting based on interest, occupation, industry, geography, demographics, etc.

It is never acceptable to spam with blatant sales messaging. Yet, by promoting thought leadership content of interest to the community and crafting relationships based on trust, these niche social communities can serve as a wonderful source of prospects, partners and potential employees.

Ning's Free Promise

Ning has me torn.

I was all set to pen a post with plaudits for Ning’s decision to discontinue its free service, demanding the social networks hosted on its platform move to one of the company’s premium offerings or relocate. Here was a Web 2.0 company that was finally getting hip to the realities of maintaining a financially viable organization.

About a year ago on this blog I pleaded with Facebook and Twitter to charge users for access to its service as a means of establishing multiple streams of revenue. I argued that an advertising supported model alone would not ensure the long-term economic viability of either of these companies.

Plus, it was important to disabuse consumers of the notion that they are entitled to free and unfettered access to nearly everything on the Web – information, infrastructure and other resources. Our capitalistic society is based on a simple concept: you pay for what you consume.

However, a well crafted and thoughtful post about Ning from Shel Holz got me thinking. My previously stated view about Web 2.0 and capitalism stands up in this situation except for one glaring factor – Ning made a promise of free to its users.

In fact, as Holz correctly points out, free access was at the very core of Ning’s value proposition.

Ning now has a big-time trust issue. Yes, the community managers who have to cough up a monthly fee or deal with the hassle of moving to another platform will certainly be bitter. They were the free-loaders and of limited value to Ning.

More worrisome is the trust gap that may now form between the company and its paying customers, its employees and its partners. Anyone who does business with Ning would be well served by maintaining a level of suspicion about the policies and decisions that come from the company’s management.

Exec Visibility in Professional Services

Strategic Communications Group (Strategic) has the good fortune of representing a number of professional services firms in the IT, software implementation, telecom, business advisory and commercial real estate markets.

Unlike a product or technology development client in which you can play up features and functionality, the differentiation for a professional services firm is people-driven. Yet, the “our people are smarter than their people” argument is difficult to validate.

That’s why public relations for services firms is so critical. The resulting visibility from third parties such as the media, analysts, conferences, etc. provides important credibility, validating the smarter people argument.

Social media provides yet another channel for professional services firms to promote the thought leadership of their executives. While executive blogs are a great place to start, we’re now in the process of exploring the creation of personalized social communities using Web-based platforms from vendors like Ning and Bumpzee.

Here are two online communities that I found to be well done (neither was created by Strategic):

http://www.inmobile.org/ (for executives in the wireless industry)

http://www.thecustomercollective.com/ (for sales/marketing professionals)

Both are vendor created, yet very much educational in their content. Additionally, these communities are promoted using other communications channels. For instance, I learned for The Customer Collective (from Oracle) from an ad in BusinessWeek.