Ning : My answer to Social Commerce?

Today I watched two video's by Robert Scoble ..The first was an interview w/ Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame and Gina Bianchini CEO of Ning . The second was the actual demo of this new and very provocative service. The reason I bring this up is that I recently wrote about how I could build a "bridge" to other social networks for our new member based site.

This service is unique in the fact that it is a simple, cheap and has a great set of tools like being able to have widgets embedded (meebo/flickr/videos/twitter) . It really allows the community creator to really tailor and be nimble towards his or her own community needs. I really like the fact that I can essentially white label this for our upcoming startup. I can make a private site if I want and the best part is our Web Developer can totally customize it from the original source code.

What I really like about this service is the ability for a relative non-technical adept person can do this quite easily.

I believe that this could be the next evolution in Social Networks due to the extreme niche targeting that can take place.

Blendah Search Engine

Well over the weekend I played w/ my Google Custom Search Engine(CSE) some more and came up w/ Social Tagging Based Search Engine. I am not very technically competent when it comes to programming etc so this is pretty easy stuff.. I registered this site on Google and use there Apps for Domain service's. I think the whole site cost me $10 for everything..

It was pretty easy to setup up the CSE. I use the refinements as Del.icio.us / Reddit / Wikipedia / StumbleUpon / GooTube / Technorati / Flickr. I would like at some point to have an nice Ajax version of this search...

Let me know what you think?

Do you see Google CSE/CoOp as a move towards a social based search algorithm for Google?

Social Commerce ???

I have been thinking allot about how to incorporate Social Networking into our new E-commerce based membership startup...forums/classifieds/member pages etc.. are all the likely suspects. The problem is that we have to build a vibrant community first..so how do we do this and get some sense of relationship building?

It seems like their are multitudes of options out there whether it be a tools Meebo, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Me.dium and leveraging other social networking sites like Myspace , Facebook , Youtube and Flickr.

This can get intimidating quite quickly but I think that I have come up w/ a scenario that will make it easy for members to interact w/ our staff and other members in an efficient manner.

Can you have a site that incorporates a mix of Social Networking tools but doesn't have the typical infrastructure i.e forums, chat rooms, member pages?

Could we mesh the ability to use tools like Meebo which blends all major IM's (Gtalk,AIM,YIM,MSM,Jabber) together in a web based widget instead of using LivePerson?

Second would be how can we take that to the next level..a blog would be nice..but our demographic audience are primarily 18-27 males.. so we need to keep it short and simple. I came across this article from Lifehacker regarding real world applications for Twitter. Twitter is an application where you can post quick blurbs about daily happenings in your life and are sent via Sms, IM's or Blogs.

The key in my mind is somehow to use these tools to make a bridge between our site and the big boys i.e Youtube/Myspace/Facebook/Flickr.

Our strategic marketing plan is to develop relationships in community forums that are specific for our startup. Could we find a way to incorporate a community based off of Me.dium
that would give our members and fellow enthusiasts to socially surf? Maybe this is taking it to far.

Let me know what you think I should do regarding a "Social Networking Strategy"

Community = Web 2.0

After reading a couple of great post's by Nic Brisbourne ..it really got me thinking about organic viral marketing . His first post was about what makes community's succeed. It was a fascinating read especially w/ all of the news this week associated w/ Digg and Flickr and their decisions to ruffle the feathers of their initial users.

"Webforums like the Mobile Monday Yahoo Group are a good and simple example - people post news and questions to the group and over time rules have emerged governing what is allowed (anything to do with the mobile web) and what isn’t (blatant advertising). When the rules are broken people respond with lots of angry posts and if necessary the moderators wade in to sum up group opinion and explicitly say what should be allowed and what shouldn’t. Thus the group has a set of rules, is self policing and thrives because of it. If the self policing failed and the advert spam became to voluminous people would stop participating and the community would fall apart.

An interesting question then is how those rules evolve, and if you are building an online community what you can do to influence that evolution to maximise your chances of success."

By Nic Brisbourne

I am actually in the process of e-commerce/membership based startup that will be leveraging online car community's as evangelists. Our #1 concern was not to force our "service" down the members of these community's. So my first thought to gain some traction was to offer a $5k Shopping Spree for new members that sign up in Lottery. This seemed ok at the time..but I wasn't convinced that this would get us the kind of customers that we want to evangelize for us and to get a handle on our unique business model.... Well as luck would have it I was logged on to me.dium.com and saw a bunch of people crowed around a site called Woot.com . This social commerce site sells 1 product a day...that's it and thousands of people flock to it.. to participate in online banter about the product of the day whether good or bad. The products are priced way below any thing on the net... so that may be a big attraction...but the community is really what drives it. You will typically find 300-400 comments on a given Woot Off!

So this really got me thinking about how we can engage our potential new members in an honest way that really depicts who we are: Bring a Woot style format everyday for individual automotive communities that we advertise in to help us get out our message. We are a site that solves the problem of all car enthusiasts: "Getting the best parts in one place for the best price"

Quote from Nic Brisbourne

"Pre-critical mass there is no natural network value, so your entire value proposition can only be about personal value. That worked fine for Del.icio.us and Flickr because storing bookmarks and photos gives a lot of personal value - it doesn’t work for e.g. review sites, because until there is a critical mass of reviews there is not much value to the consumer."

I am banking that our startup will give that personal value to customer...

Me.dium a Game Changer??

Me.dium

Hmmm how do I describe this service/site/product?? . Well I believe the best way to put it is "Surfing from the clouds" (scroll down for my comments under yoparts) . I actually received an invitation code in Nov. but never activated it till Dec.


Brief Description:
You have to use Firefox as a browser..so that's a plus right there. They will be making an IE7 version available soon too. It is a sidebar that is loaded on your browser and you can actually see others that are surfing similar sites chat w/ them if you would like and see other similar sites to the one that you are own which is my favorite feature. There are privacy features so you can be anonymous or you can have your screen name displayed or you could be totally stealth if you don't want anybody to see where you are browsing (or just not activate it) . The security features are also nice when you go to a secure site..it disables the bar to you are out of it. Here is a link to a video demo

The social implications are "game changing" if traction can be made in getting enough users to regularly use it. But with a recent Digg front page appearance there seems to be a lot more users on. The coolest moment that I had on me.dium was when Steve Jobs was giving his keynote and swarms of people were bouncing back and forth between related mac site's chatting etc. It was really pretty cool.

As a e-tailer by profession I see huge consumer implications from this product too..having customer service reps welcoming shoppers coming to the site or even going to a competitor's site...

I had the pleasure of meeting Brandon Harper today on Me.dium and found out via his blog that he will be working on the development team at Me.dium very soon. I have made a couple of nice connections on me.dium so far and really like that, however today I did notice someone "spamming" a site posting live message's to a link. I noticed it and made a comment within 5 mins. one of the me.dium employees posted that they will be dealing w/ spam harshly in the future. Good Luck guys you have your work cut out for you.

Overall great site..great team ..and the makings of a great community...

Give it a whirl and let me know what you think here is a invite code to try it out