The Making and Managing of a Ning Site

Hello, I am the founder of TroopSpace.net. (www.troopspace.net) David makes excellent points in his article and unknowingly pointed out growing pains I am trying to solve myself as I have been experimenting and using SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guesses) to try and determine the best way to proceed.

I encountered a unique situation in starting Troopspace- as people began to join, many of them not only did not use Facebook or MySpace, they had barely heard of them. To quote one user when I sent her a message about using my Facebook app to promote TroopSpace: “I have to admit I’m new to all this stuff. Can you tell me what Facebook is?”

I was flabbergasted- she was a member of MY humble attempt at social networking, but had not heard of Facebook. Incredible.

To recruit members, I first contacted friends I still have in the military. This strategy worked, and I quickly grew to 15 members in a few days.

Next I went to military.com and a few other message boards and posted a message while trying to sound as “un-spammy” as possible- it was good and bad. I ended up gaining more members this way, but also got my account blocked by Military.com and one hysterical user thought I was a front for Al-Qaeda trying to get personal info. on military members. I had to post on my site that I would never, ever use or sell personal info., and furthermore pointed out that in my site’s registration I mention that people should not reveal information the jeopardizes OPSEC (Operational Security).

As a final shot back at militay.com, I also let the woman there now (she was a moderator) that unlike Military.com which actively and aggressively shows ads, my site has none. She apologized- yeah!

The message boards netted me a few more members, and friends had begun to tell friends. I created a Google ad words account, and set a budget of $50/month. That worked well, I got a lot of clicks, and I think most of my new members came from there.

Ning also has Facebook promotion, where you can use their template to create apps. I created a “TroopSpace photo viewer” app and a “TroopSpace Video” app. Those have the TroopSpace logo on them, and allow Facebook users to watch videos and photos from users on Facebook. (I have some complaints with the video viewer as I cannot directly choose the video that plays, but that is another subject).

I ran ads on Facebook, which also did well.

Here is where my problem is, and where I am interested in hearing suggestion from others:
I grew quick over the course of my first month, and am now stuck at 149 members- many people have signed up and not really used their accounts.

On the plus side, many users have created groups unique to their positions in the military- we have A LOT of groups. The downside is that the people starting the groups are usually the only members on the site within that section of the military so they have no one to talk to.

Also, as David pointed out, my front page is staic- I looked at other sites and tried to determine what the best balance would be and I had been wondering if I had made the wrong choice. By leaving the front page dependent on my updates, when I don’t update daily the site feels stagnant. (in my eyes).

I have spent a bit of money as well- I am doing a member drive right now and have offered an iphone to the user that recruits the most new members- this has blown up in my face as I have only gotten 14 new members.

I am in this for the long haul as I do have aspirations once the site grows- I’d like to publish a print magazine based on a crowdsourced model (the users provide the content) but I need a few thousand members before that can happen.

So- I am at a crossroads and would LOVE insight- I can take criticism- how do I find new members? I have considered buying advertising in The Army Times newspaper, but it is expensive, to say the least. I have flirted with a billboard ad outside a base- also expensive.

There has to be a low cost way for me to din military members and encourage them to join.

So please, anyone with siggestions, I am glad to hear them. Should I redesign the front page and put blogs in the middle? I don’t know and am trying to figure it all out.

Thanks David for the conversation- I am interested in other’s thoughts!

I forgot to mention managing the site: It has been going well. I should have seen it coming, but I never expected that women (this is the military after all) would be the most active members of the board- particularly spouses and girlfriends.

While I didn’t see it coming, it has been great for my site. They have formed the biggest and strongest ties of anyone on the site, and I made one fo them an admin. It is a great feeling when a member tells you how much they love your site, and now she is an admin and loves the role. She reaches out to everyone and basically has mad TroopSpace a better place for it.

So I would say if you have a member that is on your site more than you (ha)- get them invloved. Let them help you run the site!!!

We launched the new version of the Next Newsroom site in early January and I’ve been pretty happy with the results so far.

As David noted, I originally had the site built using Drupal. I’m a big open source believer, and was excited to finally get a change to use it. But the person we had building the site couldn’t ever quite get it to where we needed it to be. Drupal sounds great in theory, but it’s not as “out of the box” as it sometimes sounds. And users found it hard to figure out how to use any of the tools there.

The great thing, maybe the best thing about Ning, is that it’s social networking for dummies. You can sign up, and have a site running in 5 minutes. And more importantly, I’ve found it’s far more user friendly.

I was recently reading J.D. Lasica’s post at Idealab calling for a set of open community publishing tools (http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2008/02/toward-a-community-media-tools.html). It gives a good heads up on the challenges of using open source CMS systems. But when I was reading his ideal list of tools that would be included in a more friendly version, I felt that to some degree, he was describing Ning (it’s not open source, but it is part of the Open Social consortium).

I agree with David, above, that Ning is not necessarily as flexible as I would like. But it’s ease of use far outweighs any complaints I’d have there.

One challenge for us is that we wanted to post articles related to research we are doing. Posting pages is not a standard feature, and it required going into the code and tweaking (Ning tells you how to do this). But the pages are not integrated into the sight’s features like “latest activity.”

We were at a crossroads last December, and having to decide whether we would spend thousands of dollars to upgrade a Drupal site (that would takes weeks or months) or switch to Ning. I agonized for a long time, but I’m so glad we switched.

Unlike Edward at Troopspace above, I’m not trying to make money. In face, I pay $19 each month to have the adds taken off.

In terms of recruiting, I had already built up a network of folks who receive a weekly email newsletter. So I began promoting the new site through that email newsletter, plus some contact lists we have. It hasn’t been too hard to crack 200 members.

Edward’s question above about participation is relevant to just about any online community you’re trying to build. Once you get people, how to get them to participate? It’s so easy to sign up, but folks need a reason to keep coming back and contributing. If you visit Ryan’s site (Wired Journalist), he’s done a great job with this part. And his groups are very rich with chatter.

I’ve found the “broadcast” feature great for sending out a question to the group and asking them to post a reply in the forums, or on the blog. I’ve also been reaching out one-on-one to some individuals in the community, asking them to blog about a specific topic. People like to be asked. I’ve just started with this, so we’ll see if it bears fruit.

Open Social: Ning is part of it. But so far as I can tell, most of initial gadgets are silly, Facebook type applications, rather than things that help me get things done. Some of the chat features seem promising. It’s early, so we’ll see. Someone is developing a member mapping gadget that would be quite cool.

I will say it’s quite easy to post things like feeds, google maps, etc. So think creatively and look elsewhere for tools to bring into the site.

We’re also just digging into promoting our “groups” function. This is one area where again, I wish Ning had more customization. For instance, you can customize the questions people have to answer when they join you site. I wish you could do this for groups, someting Drupal allows you to do. I also wish people could specifically do blog posts or upload pictures to specific groups. Right now, groups in Ning are essentially specialized forums for that subject area.

This creates a dilemma which David points to: People could be commenting on your blog posts, in your forums, and in your group forums. Do you want the conversation so spread out? Think hard about whether or not to even use groups in the first place. If you do, be clear about what you want to happen there. You can create categories in forums that essentially serve a similar purpose.

The other management challenge simply goes to the general problem of social networks. They’re so easy to join, and many people are in so many. Ning has exploded recently, especially in the journalism world, and I’ve helped create a couple myself and joined a couple of others. But do I really have time to devote to more than one? Plus Facebook? Plus LinkedIn? Plus…whatever other social networks that I can’t even remember I’ve joined?

Ryan Sholin here, one of the founders of WiredJournalists.com along with Howard Owens and Zac Echola.

I’ll address recruiting and evangelism here.

No one likes to join a new social network and find… no one’s there yet. Doesn’t make for much of a network.

So, we did the Web 2.0 thing and invited a set of people in, not exactly as ‘beta testers,’ but as seeders of the metaphorical clouds.

The first 40 members – folks who we hand-picked and invited personally – were already posting tutorials, having conversations, and leaving each other comment threads when we publicized the existence of the network.

I can’t say enough about the personal, non-intimidating UI at every Ning site.

These networks do their job because it never feels like someone else’s site. There is a huge gap between how welcome you feel on a Ning site and how welcome you feel in a comment thread on a newspaper.com or anyone’s blog or even the average Drupal-powered community site.

The last piece of the ‘Welcome’ puzzle has been to personally post a comment welcoming individual new members as often as one of us — or another already-wired journalist willing to jump in — has the time.

Especially in the first few days of the site, it was an easy way to make users who never had a Facebook profile or a MySpace page feel welcome in a simple, personal way, by saying hello, thanking them for showing up, and point them to another user or group that looks like they might be interested in.

In the end, I think Ning’s casual design and UI makes all the difference, if you’re willing to take that built-in humanity and extend it with your own.

For Edward at Troopspace.net:
Go meet Jim McBee of Fayetteville, N.C., who works with SmartNews.com
Spread your network outside of Ning — SmartNews wants content and community participation, and I bet they could give you some publicity and advice in return.
http://smartnewsnc.com/SmartNews.html

All the comments here have been great- thanks all. Ryan hit the nail on the head about welcoming new people- I made it a point to personally welcome everyone- I made a mistake though and not pointing out areas theuy might have an interest in- I think I was hoping people would coalesce around subjects/topics that interested them.

I feel that I am at the crawl phase– now I need to get to the “walk” phase- ha! This is very interesting- I am also going to install AOL’s userplane (userplane.com) to give chat functionality… anyone else tried this or know someone that has?

My name is Josh Lowe, and I work as the admin for Ed Domain on TroopSpace.net. From what I’ve noticed in our site’s 2 months worth of growth, is that a very high percentage of members sign up, then hibernate. Out of our now 151 members, I’d say 10-15 are what I’d consider “active”. The rest (the “lurkers”) might login from time to time, but don’t post anything.

Live chat is a major request! I haven’t had much time to research the userplane function from AOL, but plan to in the very near future. Our members have expressed a strong desire for live chat. I’ve included IM handles as an option for their member profile, but I seem to be the only one interested. Navigating to another site to utilize live chat isn’t appealing to our members.

The messaging withing the site seems cumbersome. Only way I’ve found is if you go to a member’s personal page, then send a message from there. Can’t forward, can’t send message to member from your “Inbox”. You can pretty much only reply to a message another member sent you. And forget about sending to/from outside mail services. I’ve contacted Ning about their messaging functions, and they informed me that they are working on a new messaging interface, which should be much more user friendly. No timeline or real details to give you on this though.

I do agree with Dave in that the Ning Forum vs. Blog sections are functionally identical. Very few of our members utilize the Forum section. Most do personal blogs on their personal page. We are struggling with the “what to do next” concept with blogging also.

As for the Groups feature, I like this. I see great potential for member involvement here. Unfortunately, as Ed mentioned earlier, many of our groups are being created, then sit stangant. As the admin, I WANT to get people involved, but don’t want to come across as too pushy. We want our members to inspire each other and create content. I just try to start a conversation that would spark the interest of a majority of that particular group.

Overall, I find the Ning platform very user friendly. I’ve enjoyed it’s versatility thus far. Their tech support is quick to handle trouble tickets and respond to questions. That’s refreshing.

If I got off subject from the original post, I apologize. I really enjoyed reading everyone’s ideas and feedback. It’s greatly appreciated! I’d love to see this open forum for ideas stay active. I’m always up for new, innovative ideas for building a better website!

I didn’t even know what a Ning site was. Thanks for the info and the links. Maybe I’ll start one.

I’m kind of late to this discussion but if you ever want to talk about ning sites I’m into that. I have a Ning site and we just hit 14,000 members . It’s focused on Recruiting

thanks

Hi,
I have a site built on Ning called rampagerugby. Its a site to help and promote the game of rugby round the world. The problem I am having is that Ning do not respond to my requsts to include more features in the group sections. You currently are not able to put photos into albums or a photo section or add videos within a group. You can embed them in a text box or a discussion but not into general folders. My site has the potential to do really well amonst rugby lovers but we feel this is a huge draw back . Does anyone know a way around this or a way of getting through to Ning?. Its not just me, I see a lot of sites on Ning are requesting these features. Its not like they are amazing feature requests, Competitors such as Socialgo and Kickapps have this as standard so its very frustrating.

Kind Regards
Joe Ting
Rampagerugby