Incorporating Social Networking Software Into Your Web Plan

Posted on January 8, 2007 by Eric Hebert
Filed Under General, Blogs, Social Media Marketing |

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I read a lot of predictions by many in the blog world about how social media & networking is going to get even bigger in 2007. They’re right, and I’d like to drop a huge ball as to how this is all going to play out. You see, the web is all about the niche, the long tail, or whatever the hell you want to call it. While millions do flock to the MySpaces and the Facebooks, they do so only because they’re the first of its kind (and by that I mean the first of it’s kind to make it really big). What happens next is going to be huge for the sites that jump on the ball first.

Niche websites that in the past would add simple forum software to build a community on their site are now going to add either affordable software (either 1 shot buy and own or monthly/yearly license fee), or use an open-source platform that’s free and is constantly being improved. It’s the latter method that is obviously going to prevail because that’s how we do it here in Web 2.0. Once said niche site builds the platform, the community starts to build. People start creating their profiles and sharing their favorite things and ideas, and things start to get crazy.

Because the audience is generating and then viewing all this content, the page views go through the roof as well as ad revenue. SEOMoz knows this and that is why they’re building a little community (they already have a nice profile creator, which is going in the right direction). The point is, with a social networking plan put in place, you allow your website visitors to interact on an even deeper level then just allowing them to post comments. They become closer to the site and closer to your business. And that’s powerful.

I’ve spent some time researching some of the options we have to incorporate social networking software into a website (in this case I’m talking about a pre-exisiting site. What we want to do is incorporate software, not re-do the whole thing). Below is a list of some of the commercially available software options.

About Me Social Networking

Alstrasoft E-Friends

DZOIC Handshakes

I will not be using these myself because one, I’m cheap and two, open-source is just going to be a better option; we’ll be able to do different things with it in the future as people F with the code. Below are some of the open-source options available:
People Aggregator

GoingON

Barnraiser AroundMe

The Mugshot Project

Over the next few weeks I’ll be taking an in-depth look into each of these and see which works best for me. So far it looks like GoingON will be may choice, but I have just started snooping so give me some time to play around. In case you’re wondering, we’ll using the software on our microbrew blog first. This will allow our audience to share their favorite beers, recipes, collectibles, pics and videos (which should be interesting!) with each other. I plan on having a monthly contest for beer fans to upload home made beer commercials. It’s going to rock.

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