In the social networking boom of the last few years, the social networking sites have been really excited for people to build applications, widgets, gadgets, and thingamajigs. Why? Because all those sparkly things bring more visitors to the social networking site, contributing significantly to the growth of those properties.
But what about your business? What about your pet project? What about your charity? How do you tap into that same power of community?
The big social networking sites will continue to be important. They are the new destinations sites on the web, and millions of people turn to them first for information about their friends and acquaintances.Empowering people to use the power of their communities to achieve their own goals can be a tricky business when it involves projecting your identity into these large social web sites. There are distractions everywhere. The key is to find the right way to project your company, project, charity, etc. into that environment. The answer will be different for many people, but few people that I have been talking to are just worried about lots of people using their social application.
Most people will want to project enough of what they are doing to attract interest. Once the interest is there, it is a good thing to let it carry across into your web site by letting people use their social identities to access some limited feature set of your site. Basically, make it easy for them to “kick the tires”. Then, if they like what they see, they are much more likely to start a long-term relationship with you (mainly through registration and other similar “calls to action”). Tying into these large social networking sites effectively is the challenge of the day.
