Social skills

9 March 2007

Looking for new ways to reach out to your customers? Try Ning. Relaunched last week after two and a half years of development work, it's a social networking platform that makes it easier for people to set up their own sites - including businesses that want to connect to their customers.

Ning was set up by Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, and Gina Bianchini in October 2004 to help people launch their own social network sites, using all manner of content including blogs, video, photos and interactive forums. Its aim is to let individuals take advantage of the Web 2.0 world, characterised by user-generated content and collaboration, and build their own communities - think MySpace, but with a somewhat smaller audience and a niche appeal. The new version, according to a review on TechCrunch, really is easy-to-use.

And where Web 2.0 goes, of course, Office 2.0 has a habit of following. The name given to the business side of the new Internet era, Office 2.0 is all about providing collaborative, easy-to-use online services that cover a range of functions from recruitment to document sharing.

Business applications are already starting to surface in the social networking world, of course. Companies like Reevoo have taken the community concept of crowdsourcing and worked out how to make money from it - in Reevoo's case, by encouraging consumers to post online product reviews and then providing data to retailers about what their customers really think. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that companies like Budweiser are also stepping into the fray, teaming up with clubbing site MingleNow.com to promote the joys of beer-drinking to party-goers.

In theory, the tech industry could put sites like Ning to good use for its own business purposes. While the platform contains the inevitable mix of family, ultra-niche and utterly bizarre sites, there's nothing to stop entrepreneurs creating their own specialist communities for customers or partners. Of course, creating a community infrastructure is the easy bit: the tough part is making it interesting enough to entice people in and get them interacting. But that's where the fun really starts - it's all about lateral thinking. It could be a moderated beta programme or customer support forum - it could be a themed network with no obvious link to your business. Given that it's free to participate in Ning and easy to set up your own network, the only real constraint is our own creativity.

By Keith Rodgers, Webster Buchanan Research