Ning, the network of social networks that boasted 20 million visitors a month, is making massive staff cutbacks and has announced a complete end to free services for its users. Those who pay for premium services will be asked to pay more, and those who are getting their social networks free of charge will be asked to fork over or phase off the Ning platform.
For a while now, we’ve been seeing Ning through rose-colored glasses. One year ago to the day, the company announced it had attained 1 million unique social networks built on its platform, along with a $500 million valuation. In May 2009, the company rolled out a developer platform along with 90 ready-to-go applications for network creators. On paper, their numbers were looking great.
Then, just last month, we got word that CEO Gina Bianchini had left the company. On the heels of this news came a 40% workforce reduction and a dramatic announcement from the new CEO, Jason Rosenthal:
When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success.
My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business. Our Premium Ning Networks[...] drive 75% of our monthly U.S. traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us.
So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning[...] All of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy.”
VP Advocacy John MacDonald added, “I feel confident that this change in direction will be very positive for our premium service customers because Ning will be 100% focused on delivering the features and services which benefit you and help you achieve your goals.”
Read more at: Mashable
___________
{Photography by Fabricio}
. . . . This would be a far cry from e-mails from folks in some faraway country telling me a long lost relative with the same last name has died and the money could be mine soon. All I have to do is send them some money. Clearly they don’t understand social networking, venture capital and the new marketing order at all. It’s not about the money, it’s about the network!
A few days later, I was forced to face reality. My friends and followers just weren’t doing the job. I know I only have 125 Twitter followers and 900 Facebook friends, but come on! Doesn’t someone have an idea? You can tweet about the beauty of the sunset or the perfect bundt cake you just baked, but in response to my question … nothing. You can provide ongoing status updates on your bout with the swine flu, but for the chance to contribute to a column idea, nada? Except for Jeff. Sorry, I won’t write a story about you.
Read more at: Forbes.com
___________
{Photography by bptakoma}
Social Media and Identity
We are witnessing a profound change in the media and advertising industries due to the emergence of social media. Companies that did not exist ten years ago, like Facebook and Twitter, have captured significant share of the attention economy from traditional publishers. Underscoring this trend is the fact that at the same time that Businessweek was selling for less than $5 million (plus assumption of debts) to Bloomberg, Foursquare’s pretty cousin Gowalla drove up Sand Hill road and collected $8.4 million for a minority stake.
Amidst this disruption, media companies are chasing after “their” audience in order to continue to broker the attention of that audience to marketers. But just at the moment that media has mastered the art of blogging, search engine optimization and CPM yield management, they are now faced with a new set of consumer behaviors that elude their programming faculties: mobile devices, location-based services and the social graph.
Driving this change in consumer behavior is the emergence of social media as a means of content production. Social media started more than ten years ago with online personal communications tools such as Evite, Shutterfly and Blue Mountain Arts. Since that time, systems have been built to support broader and more subtle social interactions. This has been achieved primarily by the introduction of new creative formats that make it easy for individuals to express information about themselves (such as status updates, tweets and check-ins) and new distribution models that enable this personal information to be shared easily among friends and followers.
Social media’s ascent has led to an Internet experience based less on pages and more on people. As a corollary to this (and counter to Marshall McLuhan’s thesis), the medium is no longer just the message. The permanence of words and images and their meaning in context has long been promoted as a foundation of media theory. In an increasingly real-time environment, however, content gives way to identity, and traditional contextual analysis gives way to dynamic social interactions.
Read more at: TechCrunch
___________
{Photography by Aveoree}
There’s a lot of hype behind measuring social media ROI. But what about the payoff on an individual basis? Those who invest time into social media on a daily basis need to see a return on that time to make it worthwhile. Journalists who regularly use social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook on the job with success make it part of their daily routine, and focus on communicating quality content that’s worthwhile to recipients.
Here’s a look at five journalists who use social media, their attitudes and approaches to it, how they fit it into their schedules, and the ROI they got from it. Though this post focuses on journalists, many of their tips can be more broadly applied to anyone working with social media tools.
Rear more at: Mashable
___________
{Photography by Pedro Simoes}
There’s no escaping social media — whether it’s for the promotion of your product, service or blog, or even just for fun, it is impossible to deny the staying power of this fairly new medium. Because WordPress is such a popular blogging platform and content management system, and has such a healthy developer ecosystem, it should come as no surprise that there are countless plugins available to help integrate your social networking efforts with your WordPress (WordPress) driven site.
While it’s important promote your blog posts with social bookmarking, it is equally important to promote and link to your actual profiles, as well. The following WordPress plugins are just a few of the options available to help you accomplish this. If we haven’t covered your favorite WordPress social media plugins, please leave links to them in the comments. (Read more, including the list at: Mashable)
___________
{Photography by Wallula Junction}
