Thursday, June 26, 2008 Toral: Creating an online social network By Janette Toral Digital Filipino
ANY community, group, school or organization can create an online social network for free.
Groups can be established in existing sites or a new one can be created.
Over the weekend, I started two social networks in Ning.com
The first one is for DigitalFilipino readers and members of my Yahoo Groups mailing list. This has nearly 2,900 subscribers to date. What inspired me is the need to have a face behind the e-mail address and hoping to get to know them more.
With Ning.com, you can customize your profile questions for members and encourage them to share information about themselves. I asked them about their birthday and website, if they sell or buy products online (and what kind of goods they sell or buy), and what topics they are interested in reading about in our site.
Slowly, mailing list members started signing-up. I have gathered 88 topic suggestions as of this writing. For me, this means
a lot. Gone are the days when I need to figure out what members are interested in and worry about what to write in the site.
To have a feel, you can join this group at http://digitalfilipinocom.ning.com. The initial signup can be nostalgic as most of the members have been there since the early days. Some of them already live overseas, though. A good number started when they were students and have remained members even now that they have their own careers or businesses. I suddenly feel old.
I also made one for my club and have uploaded there some presentation videos on the recent social networking conference. The videos can be viewed by members exclusively.
Unfortunately, a social network can only succeed if members are active. This means that they also must post an updated profile, photograph, videos, blog post and participate in forums to make the community vibrant. Proponents must be active in filling content while providing incentives for community members to step-up.
The challenge with niche knowledge-based social networks, such as mine, is it can be intimidating to start posting. One immediately worries if what they are about to write will be deemed valuable by members in the network. I hope to overcome that gap soon.
Ning.com is a very interesting service. When I first tried it, frustration got me as members are required to create a profile in each network they join in. I was looking for a feature where I can create a page and have all communities that joined share it. Later on, I realized the reason behind it. Different communities have their own niche or focus. This gives perfect reason for a person to have a unique page for every network he or she joins.
What I also like about the site is that you can make it exclusive. You can also moderate and screen anyone who wants to join.
You can upload files, which is very rare for most social networks. This means I can use this to hold an online class, disseminate e-books, presentation materials and research reports.
If the community gets bigger, a social network owner can upgrade and pay to assign a domain name and remove default ads, among others.
