Sad to see Ning go Premium only…

April 16, 2010 By Dan Thornton 1 Comment

It appears Ning, the community platform, will now discontinue its free service, and only offer a Premium version.

I think that’s sad for two reasons:

The first is that I’ve been a member of a number of interesting Ning groups, and I continue to be a member of a couple which are on the free platform and of real value.
The second is that I’m disapointed that they’ve failed to monetise the free platform successfully enough for a business they feel they can continue.

If you haven’t used Ning, it basically allows you to create a fully-functioning community website in seconds, allowing you to have memberships, forums, profiles, blogs, documents etc around your area of interest, and the base level was a free option, with payments for support (e.g. getting support in 24 hours), custom urls,storage, going ad-free, or hiding the ‘create a network’ links.

But with a new CEO, they’ve announced that will end, and free users will either have to pay or be transitioned from the service. Ning is also laying off 40% of the workforce.

Besides the fact that Ning has proved to be an incredibly useful community platform, I’m disapointed and a little surprised that the model which they’ve picked is a purely paid one.

For one thing, it moves Ning from pure community platform to potentially see competition from other areas, including project management etc – e.g. Basecamp, Zoho, or Glasscubes, for example. Or even Google Docs.

For the other, it seems bizarre that there weren’t ways to effectively monetise users passionate enough around a subject to form a specific social group outside of Facebook, Twitter etc. I understand that it may have been incredibly complicated, but I’m sure most groups would have one or two key products which would have been incredibly popular, for example, and I’m alos sure that there must be enough duplication across groups for this to have potential. After all, Techcrunch listed it as having 40 million registered users, and 1.9 million groups.

In the short term, a small percentage of 1.9 million groups which remain as paying customers is a decent enough income, but you have to wonder how many will stick with the service. It averages at 21 members per group, but obviously there’s a Long Tail in effect. Why not just shut out dormant/less than 5 member groups, for example?

And in the meantime, the incredibly responsive Posterous team have jumped onto something yet again and will build a Ning importer. Yes, they’ve jumped on the Ning announcement to get publicity, but they’ve still got to commit at least some resource to following it up!

There’s lots of anger at the way the news has been delivered to users (Many seemed to find it on other places before seeing the Ning blog posting). David at 37Signals writes that ‘Eyeballs still don’t pay the bills‘, but I suspect that’s particularly true when those eyeballs are mainly monetised by Adsense.

It’ll be interesting to see what proportion of Ning users are premium users, and what proportion remain with the company. My personal suspicion is that the platfrom they had will be the peak of the company in terms of interest, that they should have been able to effectively monestive it (Especially with $120m VC funding on board), and that their chosen route is unlikely to succeed due to a relatively weak USP , but good luck to them..

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Filed Under: community, social networks Tagged With: collaboration, freemium failure, ning advertising, ning closing free accounts, ning figures, ning premium only, online groups, social media

What’s in store for microblogging in 2010?

December 31, 2009 By lozfisher 1 Comment

A guest post by Lauren Fisher, who specialises in online PR and social media at Simply Zesty – and can be found on Twitter at @laurenfisher.
As we look forward to a brand new year, I’m sure the burning question on everyone’s lips is – what’s going to happen to microblogging in 2010? In a year that saw Ashton Kutcher reach 1 million followers on Twitter and MSN launch their own microblogging service (and MSN China clone Plurk – Dan), the next year certainly has a lot to live up to. Here, I offer a few of my own predictions for microblogging in 2010, with Dan’s thoughts below.

Increased use in organisations

I’m talking here about internal use of microblogging, as a way for colleagues to collaborate and communicate with each other. We’ve seen Google Wave emerge as a tool for professional, organisational use and I think this is the path that microblogging will take in 2010. I’ve already written on here about my thoughts on Yammer (which I still stand by) and I think we will see microblogging tools play a bigger role in internal corporate communications, as an easy and efficient way to communicate with each other. The benefits of realtime will be no more paramount than for businesses.

Dan: Totally agree, although I’m not sure I’d pick Yammer out as the key product in this area – the move is towards integrating microblogging as part of a collaborative and project management toolset – e.g. Salesforce Chatter. The novelty of an ‘internal Twitter’ is fine, but doesn’t convert those who don’t like Twitter, or those happy to DM via Twitter already. Integrated tools give reasons for people to get involved.

Twitter Declining

I won’t be the first, or last, person to say this but I think Twitter may have reached its height of popularity and I think numbers will start to dwindle, albeit slowly. The love affair with Twitter has been exciting, but it might just be over. The avalanche of spam accounts has a part to play here, but I think that when Twitter reaches its highest point of saturation, is conversely when you start to lose value in the site. It has become incredibly noisy and I am beginning to question the real use of it.

Dan: I agree to some extent. I think some of the expansion already has been down to a huge number of spam accounts, and it’s something Twitter has started to tackle, but will always be a huge problem. The lesson here is to learn from the most popular 3rd party apps – Tweetdeck and Seesmic for example, which allow far better filtering than Twitter itself. The noise levels don’t bother me too much because I’m fairly selective about who I follow (Hard to believe when I’m following almost 2k people!)

Microblogging as customer service

I think that more and more companies will embrace microblogging in 2010, beyond the extent we’re seeing now. Businesses will realise the potential of microblogging as a customer service platform though, rather than a place for sexy social media campaigns. I don’t think there will be many more hashtag competitions, we’ve had pretty much every variation of these! I hope that more companies will realise the value of microblogging to source and, most importantly, solve issues for customers. As consumers, we are expecting everything to be solved in real-time and this is what we’ll expect businesses to cater to. The power of crowdsourcing will also be recognised more and we’ll see more companies opening up product development to the masses.

Dan: Totally agree that almost every company should be using Twitter as an integral part of overall improvements to customer service. I expect to reach any tech company via Twitter, and those that do have an active role tend to respond quickly and get my repeat business!

No to video microblogging

It’s not an area that’s really taken off and I don’t think 2010 will be the year for video microblogging. Some sites have made a good attempt, such as Vidly, but once the initial shine wears off the uptake is slow. I simply don’t think that microblogging lends itself to video. A quick text update is one thing : shooting, uploading and tagging a short video is another. We’re still not as comfortable in front of the camera as we are in front of the keyboard and I don’t think this will change any time soon.

Dan: Damn it – this is an area that comes back to haunt me after I made a prediction on video at a conference that Seesmic’s original video blogging platform would take off in 2009. And I was wrong for exactly the reasons above. I’d say for the over 20s, audio blogging such as Audioboo is more accessible. However, I think there’s a huge group of teenagers who are very accustomed to broadcasting themselves on Justin.tv and Ustream. If someone taps into that market and can lure them away from sites which are heavily integrating with Facebook, Twitter etc, then we may see video microblogging take off in a couple of years. It’s also likely to be primarily mobile, and the odds are people will still video other people rather than themselves…

Location –based microblogging

If Twitter is to continue growing in 2010, I think the answer could be in location-based services. As mobile internet usage rapidly increases, we’re all going to be using location services more. If we can make real connections on Twitter with those that are physically close to us, as a more integrated part of the whole microblogging experience, this could prove incredibly popular. Integrating tweets at real-world events such as concerts and sport events will also become more popular, bringing people physically together.

Dan: Totally. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more integration between location, microblogging and special offers, but that’s definitely going to arrive this year – look at mobile social location games like Foursquare, or Google stepping up their location-based efforts. And events are a huge influence on bringing people together on Twitter – the FA Cup, the Superbowl, Eurovision etc as examples…

Integration with sites

As more people will be moving away from Twitter itself, I think microblogging will play a bigger part in existing sites. The new redesign of LinkedIn sees the now familiar stream of status updates with more prominence and I think this is probably the way many sites will go, including email services, encouraging even further interaction between people through short updates. As we become increasingly productive online in 2010, we’ll expect the microblogging functionality to feature more heavily in sites we’re already visiting, than having to go to a separate site.

Dan: Twitter, Facebook and Google are the three services that you should expect to seemlessly be integrated into almost every site you visit in the next 6 months. Each one is becoming very close to the single unified ID many people have talked about…

Microblogging in 2010 – what do you think?

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Filed Under: Microblogging, twitter, Video Microblogging Tagged With: collaboration, customer service, future, location, microblogging, predictions, trends, twitter declining, Video Microblogging

Why Mark Zuckerberg is right to dismiss Facebook users

March 23, 2009 By Dan Thornton 10 Comments

As a specialist in online communities and social media, it may seem a little strange that I would suggest Mark Zuckerberg is right to ignore the complaints of Facebook users over the recent changes to the social network, but stick with me on this one.

Mark Zuckerberg by Leafar. on Flickr (CC Licence)

The story so far:

Facebook releases a redesign which shows more of a Friendfeed/Twitter influence. Users react badly and an app is introduced to vote on the new design. The app has over 1 million votes so far, with 94% against the new layout and 600,000 comments – Facebook has over 175 million users for context. (A suitable time to remind everyone of ‘the supermarket effect‘ when it comes to redesigns?)

Then on Friday, Gawker posted details of a memo by Mark Zuckerberg to Facebook employees, supplied by an anonymous tipster. ‘He said something like ‘the most disruptive companies don’t listen to their customers’

Sadly, the memo hasn’t been published anywhere, so like everyone else, I’m going on the third-hand hearsay. Cnet has a reasonable summary of the split between people attacking Facebook/Zuckerberg for his apparent lack of concern about users, and those who are supporting Facebook. So far, though, only Robert Scoble appears to have addressed why Zuckerberg is right to dismiss user concerns in this instance.

So why is Mark Zuckerberg right?

There’s a difference between collaboration and co-creation (which I evangelise), and, as Scoble puts it, ‘letting the customers run our business mode’. Think of every product that has been dulled by focus groups until it fails to ignite any interest from anyone.

Zuckerberg wants to keep Facebook disruptive – which is completely correct if it will avoid the loss of interest associated with the previous big social networks – look at the current state of Friendster and Myspace. Both are still sizeable, but when did either of them ignite any sense of passion or controversy?

Too often, a great idea gets lost in repeated meetings, discussions and trying to meet the expectations of everyone involved – now try applying the views of 175 million people to a business plan.

Leadership by Dunechaser on Flickr (CC Licence)

And it takes strong leadership to lead any project, no matter how democratic in nature – from Wikipedia to Twitter, users contribute, collaborate, create, build-on and influence – but eventually someone has to pick a strategy and run with it.

And the redesign is leading to reports of the benefits for brands and for Facebook advertising.

Meanwhile Scoble points to user data and recommendations leading to businesses. And the fact that people may claim they’re rushing to leave since the redesign, but what people say is often different to what they do, and with such a critical mass, there are a lot of strong ties to break, with no like-for-like alternative really getting any attention.

They just don’t get it:

Part of my reason for posting is an article by Frank Reed over at Marketing Pilgrim, and others like it. We shouldn’t confuse customer service with customers dictating business strategy simply by an immediate backlash – all customer input should be acknowledged, and then a decision has to be made to act on it. It’s the same confusion that portrays Open Source as impossible to make money from, or social media as the only place to bother marketing in.

(And for the record, I don’t like the new design, I’m not going to leave over it, and I probably use Facebook 1-2 times a day for pleasure and 3-4 times a day for work, preferring Twitter and Friendfeed).

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Filed Under: Business, social networks, Uncategorized Tagged With: Business, co-creation, collaboration, communities, customers, facebook, feedback, leadership, mark zuckerberg, redesign, social media, social networking, social networks, the supermarket effect, Uncategorized, users

About the community, by the community

February 6, 2009 By Dan Thornton 6 Comments

Here’s a good example of changing the way we do things, by the always interesting Neil Perkin at Only Dead Fish, from an idea by the also always interesting Herdmeister. And like most good ideas, it’s blindingly obvious when you see someone else do it!

Basically Neil was due to present at a conference on the subject of community. So he crowd-sourced it. And ended up with 30 slides submitted by a range of people (including myself). And a rather good presentation.

You can see his thoughts on crowdsourcing a presentation, and then presenting it, plus his words which accompanied it.

Due to my choice of blog template, you might need to click through to slideshare to be able to read the text well. It’s worth doing to subscribe to Neil’s presentations, like the one I previously recommended.

A Presentation About Community, By The Community

View more presentations from neilperkin. (tags: branding brands)

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