What is happeNING to social media?
Last week I gave a presentation to the Memnet conference about the way membership and professional bodies need to embrace the opportunities presented by social networking sites and web 2.0 technologies if they are to retain one of the key benefits of membership: professional networking.
Between drafting the presentation and delivering it (a couple of weeks) I took my eye off the ball, or should I say balls. Actually, keeping abreast of the position of the social media balls is alike watching an exhibition snooker match between Ronnie O’Sullivan and Alex Higgins: blink and you will miss a few.
What has happened? What seismic event the size of a large Icelandic ash cloud has rocked the world of online networking? Ning have only gone and declared that they will move to a subscription only model for providing its communities. Not for individual users, but for those who use the Ning environment to create communities, its ‘Network Creators’. That’s you and me, if we use or were planning to use Ning within our membership social media strategy.
And that’s just not fair, is it? I mean, the whole point of social media is that it is free to the user, isn’t it?
It might come across as that, but I need to make one thing quite clear – there is no such thing as a free lunch and social media is no exception. If it is ‘free’ to me as a user, someone else must be paying for the infrastructure, after all the folk providing social networking technology have got to eat, drink and make merry, just like me. So in principle I have no objection to a subscription model based on network creators paying, just so long as the pricing model is the right one. The alternative is, of course, adverts I have no control over and which might conflict with the professional environment I am aiming to create.
Ning will stand or fall by this decision, but the fact remains that it has just about the most effective platform for professional social networking, particularly as its offer comes without the need to host the platform or own a domain name. A lot of the backwash against the decision comes from network creators who are small not-for-profits or individuals who, faced with the need to pay, quite rightly see this as change to be resisted. But with Facebook, Yahoo Groups, Linked In, etc, I imagine they chose to use Ning in the first place for reasons other than the fact that it is ‘free’.
In many senses Ning is a victim of its own success. Its strategy to enable network creators to escape adverts and Ning branding through the payment of an annual fee has led to it becoming a less attractive proposition for the big corporate advertisers. The learning here isn’t ‘to pay or not to pay’, more that a mixed economy – subscriptions and advertising – leads to a less effective economy and Ning clearly felt this was impacting on its ability to invest in product development.
As with all social media initiatives, Ning is moving faster than most of us are used to. With ‘free to create’ networks coming to an end in July there is not much time for organisations who tend to take time to chew things over and consider the alternatives to react. The big question for me is how far this speed of change is driven by innovation (good thing) or commercial/financial imperatives which throw a spotlight on the long-term viability of Ning (bad thing). But, with a pricing plan that doesn’t seem to lead to an onerous commitment from organisations, I think on balance that Ning is still well worth persevering with. It is tried and tested professional networking technology that can only improve and make itself more attractive to membership organisations as the data relationship between the platform and institutional CRM systems evolves, a development clearly signposted in Ning’s vision for the future.
Is this the tip of the iceberg for social media as the global economic situation bites deepest into the advertising revenue? Possibly. But remember, it is never about the technology it is only ever about the people, our members, and how they need and want to network. If Ning was right when it was free to create it is probably still right when it costs £150 - £400 per year to create a network; after all, you were probably paying that to get rid of all the annoying adverts!