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Social Networking During the past five years I’ve
been involved with the development of four social products that included content, community and sharing. Several of those
services were architected from scratch – while the latest project utilized a licensed white label social networking platform. This experience provides a solid basis for helping you sort through
the following issues when developing your social networking strategy.
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Social
Requirements, Goals and Strategy What are the social requirements for the community? What do you want your customers to do
while engaged? What is the demographic profile of your customer base? Is the community in-facing (for employees), out-facing
(for customers) or both? What are
the goals of the community, what do you want to accomplish? Is it to offer customer support, provide consumer education, enable
user networking, to generate new business, enable product information sharing, increase branding, collaborate on new
products, identifying expertise for the community, or to listen to what customers are saying about your products and company? What is
your social media tools, content and communications strategy? Twitter and Facebook? Sure - but will you need other tools
such as wikis, blogs, RSS, podcast, forums and chat? What topical content needs to be developed
for each of these vehicles? Will the community require premium content, or will it be all user-generated content? You must also determine what the most appropriate way to communicate with your customers. The options include
email broadcasting, conferencing, special events, IM and webinars.
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Platform Selection (Technology) Once you have a clear demographic profile of your customers, and have completed the
requirements for community, strategy, content and tools – you then can focus upon the selection process to identify
the best software platform that most closely support your requirements. . The selection of which technology platform to use should always
be done last. Why? One example, the functionality for internal platforms differs from external facing platforms i.e.
collaboration modules are commonly found in in-facing platforms, and not in out-facing platforms. . Other
technical questions include - do you bring the software in house, or do you have the community hosted by a third party? Is
open source platforms an option? Do you have the technical and editorial resources to deploy and manage the platform.
The platform's individual modules need to be evaluated. Does the content management system generate search
engine friendly pages? Are the search tools robust enough to locate all the content in the community archive? What are your
moderation requirements, and do the moderation tools support your needs?
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Traffic Generation What is your customer acquisition
and user requirements strategy? Do you support the OpenID and Facebook Connect API so users can sign
in to your site using their Facebook login username and password? Do you have a SEO and linking strategy to help generate
organic search engine traffic?
Privacy Do you allow the full range of profile generation found in Facebook and LinkedIn? Can
individuals permanently remove their profiles from the community? What about privacy and ownership issues – who
owns the content that is generated? .
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Next Steps Beyond those mentioned above,
there are many more issues to be dealt with when planning, developing and launching a new social network. If you are
considering deploying a new social community, I can help you with the requirements, strategy, software selection and deployment
of your new social community platform.
Give me a call, or send me an email if you would like to talk about your social networking needs. . Mark Sprague . 781-862-3126 P339-223-0500
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