Lindsey's Musings

This will probably come as no surprise, but I chose to create a social network with Ning for my Sprout Change project introduced a couple weeks ago.  Although I can see benefits for having a presence on LinkedIn and Myspace, a main focus of this project is to get my neighbors involved with me on this.  Ning provides a great toolset and platform for real sharing and participation.  Originally I was going to test it against just having a Facebook group or page for the project but I think a good point was made by Gorza in the article on why you should Consider Ning to Broaden Social Networking Strategy-

If you’re on Facebook and Twitter, they’re really noisy these days…there’s a lot of what I call absentee activism. But on this thing, you have people who are truly interested.

Also, Ning offers many capabilities that add flexibility that would otherwise be absent on Facebook or even Myspace.  This isn’t to say that I won’t be making a presence on both of these networks.  Although I personally detest Myspace (I foresee a future blog post on this subject), I am willing to make a presence on there if it will connect me with more people.  It helps that Hootsuite just integrated with Myspace also making it easier to keep track of activity on there.  The real goal is to direct people who don’t know about the project to my website/blog, help get the news out of new content for those that support the project and are friends, and hopefully, if they are serious about it, get them to participate and actually share and teach other on the Ning network.  In my opinion, Myspace is far too spammy to really facilitate any real type of consistent conversation on the page outside of the blog discussions and Facebook news streams are filled with news from a hundred other different people and it’s easy to miss things.  The Ning network on the other hand is dedicated to just this project.  LinkedIn will be useful when connecting with professionals that could actually help me out with the project along with other professional ventures in my life but for this assignment I really focused on Ning.

The Setup

Well they aren’t lying when you can have a network up and running in less than 30 seconds.  Plan on spending a significant amount of time if you want to actually customize the network to your liking though.  I ended up tweaking my Twitter background to also work here.  They provide some nice themes and easy to use options for those without html and css knowledge, but they also give you access to the full css so you can really customize it to your liking.  For example, I wanted my background to be fixed so that it wouldn’t move when you scroll (like on Twitter) and I was able to do it easily even though it doesn’t give me the option when I set the background image in the basic options.  For the most part it is easy to manage the network although I find it a little annoying that you can’t just drag and drop the different feature boxes on the home page like you can while editing your profile or with boxes on Facebook for example.  You have to go to Manage>Features and makes your changes, go and look at it, and then go back if you want to continue tweaking (and you will).  Also, when I was setting up my description, I realized my personal one wasn’t really going to work (which I had sort of predicted).  In the spirit of branding though and trying to maintain a consistent message and image, I slightly tweaked it to make it more community friendly.  You’ll instantly recognize it though so I think the tweak was fine.  Other things I setup were:

• Facebook, Twitter & Flickr Integration- I like that I was able to setup Facebook and Twitter apps that allow my members to crosspost their status updates to these other networks/services.  Not only is this attractive to me from a user standpoint, as the project head I’m also thinking about how this helps me gain exposure for the project.  Most of the people that will be using the network will be local and they will be posting these updates on their Facebook which will be read by other people who are local.  Since their friend is involved it gives the project more credibility and they are going to be more likely to join in themselves or at least ask about it.  I think everyone wins.  Also, it provides a link back to the network which is neat.  I wasn’t sure whether to have it as “Sprout Change” or “Sprout Change Network.”  I thought that by adding Network to the end it may spark interest more.  Let me know what you think.  It’s easy to change in both app settings.

The Flickr integration, although nice to have, has some drawbacks.  Instead of linking to the actual pictures on Flickr, it imports them into the gallery so you now have two copies floating around the internet.  I wish it would just show them from Flickr and that it would take you to the page when you clicked on them.  Also, it doesn’t look like you can just import one picture.  It’s rather bizarre to be honest.  To get the two pictures I wanted to upload, I had to upload all that I had labeled as “branding” and then go through and delete the others.  The Youtube integration (along with other video services) is also a little strange to me because it gives you an embed code that is linked back to you and not Youtube if you were to want to share it from the network.  I feel like I’m almost stealing these people’s videos even though I’m clearly not.  Anyone else kind of feel this way?

• Gifts- I was all excited for this feature at first.  I don’t like the “credit” part of it but I thought I’d be able to set my gifts as free and as awards, which means that only I, as the admin, could distribute them.  It was even more amazing that I could create my own custom awards.  The grand idea was to use the gifts like badges of honor and accomplishment.  The idea behind the project is that I would attempt different things that would help us live greener, do all the the research and using that and my own experiences, come up with a guide for my neighbors to follow.  My neighbors would use this network to actually show their own journey of following my guide and offering their own experiences so that it may be improved upon.  After they’ve shown proof and have completed it, I’ll award them a badge.  Not only is this a sign of accomplishment and progress, it also can be used to show their expertise to other users on the site which makes their advice more credible like when talking in the forums for example.  It all fell apart though when I discovered that awards are an automatic 25 credits and admins can’t distribute them for free, even if they were made themselves.  Absolutely silly and at $1.50 / graphic absolutely ridiculous.  Needless to say, I disabled gifts on the network until they change this.  Very disappointing since it could have been a very neat feature.  I’m thinking of other ways I can implement something like this.
• Apps-  Another neat feature is the ability to add apps to the network.  I was specifically looking at the YouTube, WordPress, Polldaddy, and Feedly apps as I think they’ll come in handy.  I think my Flickr issue would be solved by an app too but they don’t have one on there yet.  Unfortunately the Feedly app doesn’t work as it won’t let me pick which feeds to use.  Also the application pages suffer from a rather large amount of spam in the comments so they are less than helpful.  Also, on the profile page, a member can add an app by url but this flexibility doesn’t seem to be available for site-wide apps.  Very strange.
• Profile Questions- I added custom profile questions that people can fill out.  Not only does this allow people to get to know one another better, but I have a couple private questions that will help me gain a better perspective and the type of people that are joining the project.  I ask them questions like have they ever gone to a farmers market, composted, etc.
• Groups & Forums- I setup two example groups and some starter forum categories.  I noticed that the No Impact Experiment uses a Ning network and that it is rather hard to navigate now that it is populated with members and many posts and discussion boards.  It looks like they actually did a major cleanup recently to solve the problem but since I saw what occurred, I’m going to try and avoid  that.  I’m trying to decide whether to have the topics as separate groups because each has its own discussion area or make each topic its own category in the main forums.  One option is to have the main topics (that the guides talk about) as the main forum categories but then have groups for the specific separate local areas here in Sacramento so those that are actually near each other can have their own discussions with each other.  I’m still waffling on what I’m going to do about this.
• RSS-  Of course the activity stream along with groups, forum, etc. has its own RSS address which I’ve added to my reader and will be adding on the main project blog sidebar.  Also, you can add RSS feeds to your homepage if you’d like with the RSS module.  I used this to add the Twitter @sproutchange and delicious feed to the page.
• Badge-  I like the badge that members can post in other locations to show their membership and hopefully get others to join as well.
• Chat-  I like that the chat bar shows at the bottom of the screen which allows you to see who is online and let you talk to them in real time.  It is a lot like the Facebook chat.
• Blog- I wish there was a way to integrate this with blogs that people may have in other locations but oh well.  They can use the RSS box to add a feed to their profile page at least except they only get one.  I wish you could add as many text boxes and RSS feed boxes as you wanted (up to five)  like you can on the main site.  I was surprised to see that blogs had features like setting a time for it to be published in the future and the ability to save drafts.  Members will be encouraged to blog about their experiences and efforts along with contributing in the forums about specific issues and questions.
• Event-  It’s rather painful for me to have events both on here and on Facebook.  I’ll probably just have to get over it though as I don’t see an app for this yet either.  At least this way, other members can also add events.
• Pages- If you go to the tab manager, you can actually create new pages.  To edit the content, first create the page and then go to its tab.  You will then see an edit button.  You can also layer tabs to create dropdown menus to consolidate the navigation and organize it.  I added an About page with dropdown links to the main project blog feed (which doesn’t exist yet so it shows this feed) and a feed of tweets that mention Sprout Change.  I haven’t written the actual copy for the page so it’s just a placeholder.  You’ll notice I did little fillers for many of the features so I could just try them out and see how they’d appear on the homepage.
• Analytics-  I didn’t set this up yet but I was happy to see that they have included the ability to add this if needed.  When we cover this later I’ll have to come back to it.

The Result

Visit- http://sproutchange.ning.com/

Overall, there are things I love and things I’d love to change but for what it is, it is a great solution to being able to create your own social network.  I’ll just have to get a little creative with RSS feeds and the widget abilities of the text boxes to fulfill my entire vision for what I’d like to have for my project I think.  I’m still tweaking the positions of the different features on the homepage but my current theory behind my choices is heavily based on the fact that the right sidebar is always visible.  When a user refreshes or goes to another page, it will get updated.  I figured that’d be the best spot to put the latest activity and Twitter feeds.  The left sidebar contains kind of the “resource” boxes such as photos, videos and shared Delicious links.  I also stuck the events there high up so they’d be noticeable as they are time-constrained.  I didn’t feel like they needed to always be visible though.  The middle section contains the real meat and potatoes such as the members, which I feature at the top as it’s suggested to keep them prominent, groups, recent forum and blog posts, and the chat box (which is then at the bottom of the screen on all the other pages).  I stuck the informational image in the middle for now just to show how this site fits into the plan I had set out.  It needs to be modified to be more readable at that size but I doubt I’ll be keeping it there anyways.  I do think I will keep something more graphic-y there to break up all the boxes and add some informative fun.

If anyone has advice regarding whether to use groups or the forum categories to confine the conversations, whether to use “Sprout Change” or “Sprout Change Network” as my Twitter and Facebook application titles, or any other advice for layout, please comment!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 5:43 am and is filed under Assigned Topic, Ning, Pet Project, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.