Your social networking site will be a platform for people to interact, forge connections, and possibly meet in the real world.
As such, there will always be risks. Case in point: The recent news reports about a host at Airbnb who had her home trashed by “guests.”
Media stories are calling the event “The Moment Of Truth For AirBnB.”
As CEO Brian Chesky noted in a guest article on Techcrunch…
With a single booking, one person’s malicious actions victimized our host and undermined what had been – for 2 million nights – a case study demonstrating that people are fundamentally good.
Communities — online or off — rely on trust and the assumption that “people are fundamentally good.”
Sometimes that trust will be broken.
Now, Airbnb advises hosts to rely on review, communication with potential guests, and even their own gut instincts to avoid problems. I’ve used the service as a guest and a host, and — like any online social platform — you take precautions and risks when interacting with strangers.
Airbnb is taking some steps to beef up its staff and processes to guard against future issues, but where they’ve really dropped the ball is how they are managing their communication.
The Real “Moment Of Truth” For Airbnb
While I understand the risk of online social platforms, any social networking site is a community, and — as the words suggest — communication is core.
Right now, Airbnb’s communication has really been sub par.
Airbnb’s CEO has yet to address the thousands of hosts it relies on directly. No blog posts, no direct messages through the internal system, and nothing on their Facebook page.
Instead, we’re relying on posting like the one on Techcrunch to get updates, instead of getting word directly. A cynic would suggest the company is more focused on talking to investors than to the commnity that built it.
Chesky talks about how important transparency is to the Airbnb community. But transparent shouldn’t mean invisible.
 If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
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When you’re starting a niche social networking site, getting your first 2,000 members is a crucial step. And the more members you can get before you even launch, the better.
Apart from tapping into your existing networks and connections related to your niche, offering early-adopter invitations while still in beta is a great idea. Not only does this give you early users, but limited invites can actually create some buzz around your launch.
Now a new web service lets you create a viral “Launching Soon” page for your social network to start building your pre-launch list.
LaunchRock collects user emails with the offer to let them know when your site launches.
That’s pretty straight forward. A simple opt-in form could do the same thing.
Where LaunchRock, well, rocks is that when users submit their email address, it invites them to use share buttons (Facebook, Twitter, or email) to invite their friends.
“The more friends you invite, the sooner you’ll get access!” is the proposition…
The brilliant thing is that this lets you tap into your potential members’ social networks before you even launch!
With the right site and supporting copy, this could be a powerful tool to get potential users to share the link to your site before you even launch.
It shows returning visitors how many visits and sign-ups their links has generated.
The LaunchRock blog has some good tips and case studies, as well, and gives full credit for the idea to Forkly.
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
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Getting widespread media coverage for your niche social network can have a big impact on your membership numbers.
But how do you get the media’s attention?
One great strategy for social networks is to give the media a peek into your community, and make a connection between how people interact within your network and extrapoloate it to the larger world.
Dating sites have been doing a great job of this over the years, and the media laps up these stories like nothing else.
Case in point: Dating site/social network Badoo recently put out a media release ranking cities by the number of online flirtations initiated per month by the average user in each. Simple enough premise, and certainly an easy to find metric.
Clearly, this hardly counts as a “study,” but it’s exactly the kind of fun, light — and most importantly, space-filling — story the media loves.
The headline, “Social Network names Athens as The Most Flirtatious City in The World,” was eye-catching, and within days Reuters picked up the story and sent it to all of their affiliated outlets, many of whom published it word-for-word! At last count, over 80 outlets had run the story.
So what are your members doing that may make a similar story? Are they acting in ways that confirm stereotypes, or confound them? Do your membership numbers show a surprising number of men taking up knitting, or shocking number of women drinking Scotch?
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
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Really enjoyed serial entrepreneur Joseph Perla’s post on How to drop out of college and start a funded Social Network in 13 “easy” steps.
I especially love the business model — and how it came about — for Zinch.
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
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Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook and the chief digital organizer for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, has just launched social networking site Jumo, in an effort to deepen ties between members and their favorite causes.
“The more connected that individual is to an issue they care about, the higher probability there is they will stay involved over a longer period of time,” Mr. Hughes told the New York Times.
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
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Older users are joining and using social networks in ever higher numbers, according to a May 2010 Pew Internet & American Life Project survey. Usage among internet users ages 50 and older has nearly doubled over the past year, from 22% to 42%.
The study says 47% of Boomers (50-to-64-year-olds) internet users and 26% of seniors (ages 65 and up) report that they now use these sites.
Not surprisingly, Pew suggests boomers and seniors are looking to reconnect with people from their past and stay connected with their kids and grandchildren.
But Pew also attributes the increase in part to the fact that people with chronic diseases are finding a lot of solace and comfort — not to mention information — online with fellow sufferers. I’ve written before on how challenges create stronger social networks, and this is a great example of this.
(via eMarketer: Social Networking Doubles Among Boomers and Seniors – eMarketer.)
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
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SocialEngine 4.0 was released earlier this month, and its new Software Development Kit (SDK) is also out.
Next out is the SE3 to SE4 upgrade script. Charlotte Genevier at Webligo tells me that it should be out in a couple of weeks. Given that 4.0 is a complete redesign and restructuring of the previous versions, it’s a pretty complicated task.
Also in the works is an import script for people moving their social networks off of Ning and onto SocialEngine. This will manage the full export of Ning data that user get with an “account termination and export.”
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
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For many new social networks, an invitation-only approach makes a lot of sense.
Not only can you focus on developing the community and its interactions, but when properly done you can also create a real demand for invitations.
Now, Dribble, a social network where designers, developers and other creatives can share samples of their current work, is leveraging that perceived value of an invitation to raise money for charity.
Dribble users are raffling off 25 invitations to Dribble to raise $5,000 for mycharity: water. That puts the value of a single invite at $200!
All for a good cause, while generating good will, media coverage, and even more interest in getting in the door.
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
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 Curverider, the company behind the Elgg open source social networking software, will begin sending beta invites for their hosted social networking service, Elgg.com, on June 14th.
This is a paid service, with monthly subscriptions start at $29.95, competing head-to-head with Ning.
Unlike Ning, Elgg.com will feature a full export tool, letting site owners who want to eventually move to a self-hosted solution using the open-source version of Elgg to export content as well as members.
“We’ve listened to the privacy and data ownership concerns that are rife in the industry and have developed Elgg.com to address them,” says Dave Tosh, co-founder of Elgg. “Network owners can export all their data at any time at the click of a button. This gives them the ultimate flexibility: if they decide to bring the whole network in-house, they can export the data to their servers, download the open source Elgg software for free at Elgg.org and they’re good to go.”
This means for the first time that entrepreneurs creating social networks can start with a hosted solution — saving development headaches and costs — and then switch to self-hosted once they reach critical mass, all without losing content.
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
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Facebook gets a lot of grief for their privacy gaffes, and for the clumsy way of rolling out new features that impact privacy, but they are also an important model to understand for any social networking site dealing with their own privacy policies and privacy settings.
This is obvious when you look at this great piece in the NYTimes on The Price of Facebook Privacy. Facebook’s newest Privacy Policy is 5,830 words long, longer than the US Constitution. The accompanying infographic displays the 50 settings with more than 170 options user have to navigate.
With Facebook pushing the limits on distributing information, nearly every type of content in your profile has its own controls. So instead of saying all photo albums are private or public (which could cut off huge amounts of information, and the information sharing that fuels Facebook), users have granular control over individual albums. Some you want to share with family, some you really don’t.
As you sit down to map out the privacy policy and settings for your own social networking site, you will be balancing your desire to have people share (which drives interaction and engagement) with their desire to control who sees what. While yours may not be as intricate as Facebook’s privacy controls, keep in mind that they will have set your users’ expectations about the level of control they have over their information.
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
Click here to learn more!
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