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.

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