Yes very interesting...We

Albert Aimers — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:18:55 -0700

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Albert Aimers
CEO
Financial Media Group Inc

Social network niche mixes events and communities

IDG News Service — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:07:29 -0700

Twitter users raging out of frustration and boredom during last week's SXSW conference session when BusinessWeek writer Sarah Lacy interviewed Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg is probably not the outcome businesses and organizations have in mind as they adopt new social media tools to manage events and build online communities.

While more than 70 white label social network applications like Ning, Lithium, and KickApps crowd the market, only a handful are differentiating themselves by tying together event management and building online communities. Conference planners are beginning to adopt the new media tools like Twitter to not only help people better connect and share ideas just prior to and during event but as a way to ignite year-round online community vibrancy.

"Across the board people discount the social needs of their customers," said CrowdVine founder Tony Stubblebine of Mill Valley, California. "Conferences are focused on attracting people based on the content of the conference but the people you meet are as strong a draw as the sessions."

In the past two years, there's been a shift in corporate thinking about the value of integrating events and online community building as new technologies have made things like image sharing and finding people easier.

"Five years ago during the first wave there were two types of online communities - tech people looking for answers about how to do things better and faster and end-user customers of custom brands trying to get answers to questions," said Michael Walsh, co-founder and chief executive officer of Leverage Software of San Francisco, Calif. "Now we have tens of millions of kids coming into jobs having experienced communicating with Facebook and then going into companies asking why email and intranets - why not communicate with people through social networks."

Small World Labs, introNetworks, CrowdVine, Leverage Software, and EventVue are among the few companies focused on the new market for integrating one-time conference management with year-round online community building. Meanwhile some bigger names in event management software, like WingateWeb of Lindon, Utah, are slipping a few social networking features to their applications.

Technology conferences and other early adopters of applications that marry community building and event management are demanding features and functions be cutting edge yet very easy to use. Their long shopping lists include real-time community intelligence; video messaging; Twitter integration; search and matching; communication by request;in-network blogging and blog feeds; image uploading; session planning;alert tools; rating and review tools; multiple languages; data portability to other social network platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Bebo; and integration with major registration systems like Experient (formerly Expo Exchange), EventBrite, and RegOnline.

When Kymberlee Weil co-founded introNetworks of Carpinteria, Calif.(DEMO@15) five years ago using technology for social networking was not well understood. "Back then event planners were interested in adding value to attendees at an event and offering something no one else did,it took them a while to realize this is a tool that fosters communications year round" said Weil. "In the last 12 months, social networking has taken off. Now it's expected."

After a year of development, introNetworks recently introduced a smart, social networking application rebuilt with the recently released Adobe Flex 3 software, which enables a component architecture so users to turn on and off features depending on what their community needs. introNetworks' new system has been deployed in a beta test for the Adobe Developer Connection for more than five months. introNetworks plans on moving its current 200 customers from its former Flash-based application to its new Flex-based one.

Unlike applications that list people's names with profiles and require laborious manual searching, introNetworks features a visual matching engine that automatically sifts through data and dynamically matches community members based on what's most relevant to them.Matching is deliberate and based on tags (keywords) rather than by randomness. Matches are displayed on as pins on a four-color circle quarted by categories of the customer's choosing. introNetworks pin metaphor extends beyond people to other information such as products,conference sessions or articles.

introNetworks' matching capabilities and visualization of data attracted MyVetWork, an online community expected to launch this summer for 90 million people who are U.S. military veterans and their families, said Susan Bird, chief executive officer of Wf360, which is creating the community. "The matching is very sophisticated and easy to use," Bird said.

While today's game-changing technologies add value, Michael Wilson,founder and chief executive officer of Small World Labs of Austin,Texas believes it's a mistake to focus first on features and functions when building an online community.

"Community building is not a features and functionality race," he said. "You have to take a step back and look at community building from the audience's perspective. There are all sorts of cool, interesting things to do but you need to make sure your base offering - why join and why come back - are core areas of value and then map features and functions to your guiding principles."

With the hundreds of thousands of conferences looking to attract and retain customers, the market for companies that mix online community building with event management is wide open.

Company Snapshots

CrowdVine of Mill Valley, California is two-person company started last year by former O'Reilly Media lead engineer Tony Stubblebine, who is funding the company himself. CrowdVine touts ease of set up and ease use as key features as well as integrated scheduling and feedback. CrowdVine has been used at technology conferences Web2.0, Future of Web Apps, Adaptive Path, ApacheCons, and FooCamps and a few non-tech organizations. The technology platform is based on Ruby on Rails.

EventVue of Boulder, Colorado is a three-person company founded last fall by Josh Fraser and Rob Johnson, college friends who previously operated a Web site development company, Curio Solutions in Greenville, South Carolina. Last September, EventVue received US$250,000 from angel investors Brad Feld, David Cohen, Dave McClure, Wendy Lea, and others. Although the Linux-based product is in private beta, EventVue has customers including Venture Capital in the Rockies, the National Biodiesel Conference, O'Reilly Media's Graphing Social Patterns conference, and Community Next conferences. EventVue, which claims simple ease of use, integrates with two leading registration system providers EventBrite and RegOnline so its system automatically adds new attendees to the EventVue community as they register for an event.

introNetworks of Carpinteria, California is a nine-person company started five years ago by Adobe Flash expert and technical writer Kymberlee Weil and Mark Sylvester, a pioneer of 3-D animation and winner of an Oscar from the Motion Picture Academy for technical achievement. introNetworks has received $3 million in funding from private investors and Adobe and with 200 customers "is close to positive cash flow," Weil said. Customers include CMP Media, Harvard University, Xerox, United Way, Autodesk, Fortune, Intel, Ziff Davis,and Starcom Media Vest. Based on Adobe Flex 3, introNetworks offers eventNet, memberNet, and talentNet, which can be integrated. introNetworks markets its applications as easy to implement, maintain and scale with the capability to display data visually. introNetworks provides community managers with on-demand access to all of the back-end data of their network so a customer can assess and react to feedback and activity of their community. introNetworks system scales to one million users.

Leverage Software of San Francisco, California, co-founded in 2003 by Michael Walsh, a former wireless start-up executive, has 200 customers and has been profitable for the past 18 months. Its products are open through APIs and widgets to enable customization. The products include an advanced wiki and a visual people map built in AJAX. Products integrate with 20 event registration systems including the market leader Experient. Leverage Software, which employs 27 people, expects to double its staff this year and is seeking Series B funding of $8 million to $20 million in either venture or equity funding to finance growth internationally. Its $2.5 million series A was from angel investor Halsey Minor, founder of CNet and the largest private investor in salesforce.com. Customers include Apple, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, salesforce.com, InfoWorld, and The New York Times.

Small World Labs of Austin, Texas, founded in 2005 by Web analytics expert Michael Wilson, takes a hands-on approach to community building by community-building and managing expertise as well as a social-networking architecture as a hosted platform. The company has been profitable since its inception and just announced receiving more than $1 million toward Series A funding round from several investors including Clearmeadow Partners. Small World Labs customers include the Dallas Morning News, San Diego Union Tribune, CMP, Guideposts, Fox Networks, Oracle, Save The Children, American Cancer Society, Melcrum, and Hyperion.

The Industry Standard - Social network niche mixes events and communities - Comments

Yes very interesting...We

Social network niche mixes events and communities