Tomorrow’s live interview and SNAP news
In last week’s Wall Street Journal, economist David Hale shined a spotlight on a piece of data that some would have thought was still far down the road.
The current business cycle will go down in the history books as one which confirmed that leadership in the global economy is now shifting from the old […]
A Pew Internet & American Life Project survey of early Internet adopters showed that the most common reason they got online was to connect with colleagues. Granted, they were social networking through BBS’s and mainframe shared time, but it was social nonetheless. (You other early adopters can probably cite the appropriate quote from The Breakfast […]
Read & discuss at david@highcontext.com (C. David Gammel)'s blog.
Heh. My buddy Chris Brogan has this awesome list for what to do if you’re looking for inspiration for things to do online.
White label social networking site (SNS) platforms are nothing new. Setting up a white label SNS is like creating a facebook for your membership. For example, Ning.com, one of the most popular of these, lets you create a SNS around any topic you want in a matter of minutes in their hosted environment. I have a crusty, dusty old Ning site called CAE and Proud, and Jeff De Cagna has one for his Ungovernance work. CollectiveX is another popular white label hosted SNS platform that was reviewed by Dave Sabol some time ago.
Both sites let you start communities for free, but if you want to remove (or receive the monetary benefits of) the Google ads that appear in the sidebar, you pay a small annual fee. They are both customizable to a degree, allowing you to use your own color scheme, organize the sections of the community into whatever order you want, and upload your own logo, among other things.
Recently a member asked me to evaluate an open source SNS platform called Dolphin for an affiliated group he volunteers for. In the course of doing some research, I discovered that there are literally dozens of open source SNS platforms. Today, marc1919 tweeted with a link to a great roundup of no fewer than 40 open source SNS platforms. Incidentally, the list is compiled by a graphic design firm that is spinning some really outstanding logos.
Obviously there are quite a few SNS options out there. Open source has its pluses and minuses, but certainly the additional choice afforded by this new flood of possibilities is a good thing for those who find Ning and its hosted competitors limiting. And of course, if you still can’t find what you’re looking for, you can do like Matt Baehr did: download Drupal, basically a CMS for SNS, and get to creating your own custom SNS from scratch.
Still, my recommendation to associations interested in the SNS world continues to be: if you want to gain the broadest possible member participation, use facebook and Linkedin to test the waters. These sites already have millions of users, including some of your members. And asking members to sign up for your Linkedin or facebook (instead of some entirely different) group removes a barrier to entry that should increase participation.
Tagged: Association Management Associations CAE Certified Association Executive CollectiveX Dolphin Drupal facebook Linkedin Ning SNS social networking sites
And the crowd ooohed and ahhed…
For the conference’s closing night dinner, we were asked to dress as if we were attending a rock concert.
At the top of the escalator at the entrance to the party, I ran into Heather.
She had her hair braided ala Pippi Longstocking - and wore a fun jacket to boot.
I learned Heather had […]
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