NOTE: The weighted findings are now available on this followup post.
I’m preparing for an upcoming report to help segment out the many vendors in the White Label or Private label social networking industry. Essentially, these companies allow brands to create their own social network (like Facebook) for customers, partners, or employees.
Are you a decision maker for corporate websites? Maybe you’re a web strategist, a web architect, a web marketer, or a web developer in marketing, I want to know what you think is important.
As you select a White Label Social Networking vendor, what THREE criteria are important to you?
Example: Features, Pricing, Support are important to me because: X
If you don’t feel comfortable leaving a comment, sent me an email at jowyang@forrester.com
As with previous times I’ve asked you for your opinion on reports, I do share what the community findings were, and how I’m going to proceed. For what it’s worth, this is just one element that I’ll factor into my research, there’s other methods that I’ll be using to find out the criteria. Thanks for crowdsourcing with me.
Update: A Community Manager (Thanks Tom) are sending me their Request for Proposals (RFP) if you wanted to send that to me, that will really help, I’ll credit you in the final report. I’ll assume this is confidential however, and will ask for your permission before sharing outside of my immediate team.
1) Pricing: If we’re going to spend development to get it working with our site, the price needs to be better then us just building from scratch.
2) Customizeibility: We need to be able to tweak it to give it a consistent feel to our site and to be able to tie it in to our log in.
3) Dependability: Very reluctant to use services that are hosted off of our own servers due to load times and other possible problems.
We’ve recently completed due diligence for an association of 220k+ members. The client’s main areas of focus were:
1) Privacy: closed social network and data isolation (contrast to data portability)
2) Revenue Drivers: can we publish ads, post jobs, or find other areas of revenue to offset any associated costs?
3) Brand Control: some services would not allow private labels, others required us to pay their team for any design changes. client wanted flexibility to have consistent look/feel across all properties
Flexibility is most important. There is social networking fatigue going on right now. People just don’t want to bother setting up a profile at yet another social network. So the networks that have the most open standards (with OpenID, API’s, ability to embed other services, etc) will be the ones that will prevail.
Thank you for all the great posts Jeremiah. I have been on the decisionmaker side for so long that I have not spent any time blogging. I am working with the authors of the new Harper Collins book on leadership (http://www.triballeadership.net) and I believe their social networking model (based on physics) is going to be the next evolution online.
If you know of a good place to write a guest blog post about it, or a blogger who would be interested in interviewing the author please let me know.
Thank you again for all you’re doing for the web strategists of the world!
R
1. pricing: we’re a start-up
2. ease of implementation; we’re a start-up
3. fun: does it create a sticky and rich environment for users?
If I could do it all over again… I would pay attention to:
1. User experience. Users should not be getting a downgrade by going from a social network to a branded social experience.
2. Reporting. There needs to be an easy way to extract insights and metrics from the system, otherwise you will have a very hard time trying to mature the community over the long term and make sure you are meeting your success metrics.
3. Experience. There is nothing scarier than learning you are the biggest or most complex client that your social networking vendor has ever taken on.
Right now I am looking at a couple companies and am weighing pricing, solution presentation and monetization potentials because able to show potential for revenue via client sponsorship of community ect. makes a lot of sense. Additionally, I am looking for a company that is passionate about creating vibrant communities and that is committed to help us create a solution that will engage our readership! Of course we are under a little more budget scrutiny, but who isn’t these days?