Is your Facebook group doing everything possible to engage and energize your current and potential customers or contributors? Would it be worth it to your organization to create your own social media community that helps drive your ROI? Are you meeting your company’s objectives fully by leveraging online social media?

 

Definition of a “White Label” Community

White Label deployments exist as software you can brand and integrate tightly into your existing domain. The user experience should be nearly seamless. In other words, a White Label platform is one that is produced (usually) by a SaaS provider, then the company presents the community as its branded social networking site. Customization is generally an integral part of the deployment.

 

What Are the Limitations of Facebook?

Facebook is a fine way to get started with online social media. Yet Facebook has significant limitations in terms of scale. For smaller groups, it works all right. But if you expect your community to grow (and if not, what’s the point?), the Facebook solution becomes less and less cohesive. At the same time, connecting with other members in the group becomes more chaotic and less flexible. Perhaps most important, your members may hesitate to share their true passions in a public forum such as Facebook. On the other hand, a branded community with a singular focus will be brimming with like-minded supporters who hold similar zeal for the subject.

 

Focusing on Your Brand Is Critical

Creating a group on Facebook (however successful) does very little to build a true brand that has emotional resonance with your clients, contributors or advocates. A brand is much more than a logo, an identity or even a product. Relying on your Facebook group to boost brand perception is like swimming against a raging current. The Facebook brand will simply drown your identity. In order to really grow your brand in the social networking space, your best bet is to establish an independent address.

 

By giving your most passionate supporters a unique online destination to connect and engage, you will leverage the true power of social media. Because your constituents will be surrounded by like-minded people with similar passions, they will be energized—and comfortable—about  expressing opinions and sharing information with their peers. The branded environment they discover should be woven seamlessly into your existing web presence.

 

Should You Use the Marketing Power of a Branded Community to Augment Your Facebook Group?
If that makes sense to you, you may be ready to launch your own white label community. After all, Facebook will never allow you to capture member data, nor will you be able to promote your causes to registered members of your group. With an integrated social media platform, once they register, you’ll be able to track every member, create an email data base and mine demographic statistics that can be used for powerful, targeted marketing campaigns.

Think about Using Facebook as a Supplement
Perhaps the most intelligent strategy regarding Facebook and sustaining a meaningful group there is to maintain the group presence as an adjunct to your white label community. For example, the Events application is useful for updating constituents about corporate conferences you may sponsor or attend. With a link to your integrated community, you could bridge both social networking spheres of influence.

Please comment if you have thoughts about the advantages or drawbacks of launching a white label community. If your organization has successfully utilized a white label community and a Facebook group, please tell us about it.
 

5. Identify Leaders within Your Constituency

            Communicate with them frequently and praise their participation. Give them suggestions about topics they might like to raise in the community. Send them links to Social Groupings or Forum discussions that will likely interest them. Convey to them ways to start individual fundraising drives in their locale.

 

4. Let Members Launch Initiatives that Parallel Your Goals

            Within your community, energize registered users by letting them create special groups that reflect your organization’s primary causes. For example, subscribers to the Sierra Club’s Student Coalition created a “Campaign” group called Save the Whales where like-minded members gather to blog, comment, share photos and link to additional web-based information. Let your members know that fundraising, in and of itself, can be the primary focus of a Social Grouping or posted Event.

 

3. Leverage Blogging in a Variety of Ways

Inspire subscribers’ generosity by helping them connect and share stories with strong human-interest elements. Center stage blog rolls and additional blogs in “Featured Groups” give community members unique ways to express opinions and comment on others’ experiences.

For example, the Arthritis Foundation uses a robust blog roll to let members tell each other about their trials and triumphs in dealing with arthritis. Plus, “social grouping” tools developed by ThePort Network give members a heightened sense of community and desire to help others by donating. Featured Rheumatoid Arthritis and Surgery & Arthritis groups feature blog posts that are emotional and inspiring at the same time.

 

2. Listen, Learn and Adapt to Your Members’ Needs

1. Create Multiple Click-and-Donate Buttons within Your Community

Fundraising links should be spotlighted in highly-trafficked areas of your community. For example, historic nonprofit CARE places a “DONATE NOW” button prominently on its main community page, center-cut, just above “Latest News” feeds, and just below a registration button for first-time visitors. Donating is automated, simple and fast.

 

If you have an idea or question about fundraising, please leave a comment.  

If hosting your own community has strong appeal to decision-makers in your organization, take time to consider the benefits of partnering with an experienced SaaS provider. “Software as a Service” means your community and all of the applications within it are hosted on your provider’s servers. All of the content is simply accessed via a web browser. Because SaaS is subscription-based, your vendor performs daily technical operation, maintenance and support for your community for the term of the subscription.

The Logic of SaaS Benefits:

 

Reduce Costs

 

By subscribing to a proven SaaS platform, you bypass a myriad of costs and everyday worries. First, you don’t have to purchase licensed software for deployment. Second, you’ll skip the purchase of servers and the continuous maintenance of hardware and software. Third, you won’t need to search for and hire additional IT personnel. 

Leverage Economies of Scale

 

On average, your application costs will be reduced because your provider has multiple subscribers and all are linked to the same platform (or a slightly customized one). Your provider will have made the overall system highly scalable to service additional subscribers as they come on board. All the data is securely stored and maintained to serve your needs. You pay a single regular fee and your provider assumes all security and infrastructure costs. You can concentrate on growing your business. Over time, growth and innovation will go hand-in-hand with your ROI.

Subscribe and Save Cash

 

Launching a dynamic social media community can be expensive if you do it all yourself. The initial outlay is significant and upkeep costs never go away. You save capital when you utilize a software-as-a-service model. Whether you are building your own platform or customizing an open-source version, buying servers, configuring them, launching them and maintaining a data center demands a continuous infusion of capital. In addition, if your SaaS subscription is based on metered usage, you only pay for what you use.

 

Lock in a Quicker Deployment

 

Get the Latest Innovations

 

If you’ve licensed software to build your platform within, you’ll have to wait for new releases to implement platform improvements. Updates such as this are continuously evolving in the engineering departments of SaaS providers. You’ll receive new social media tools and new versions of existing tools much sooner. Also, SaaS vendors generally perform rigorous Q&A testing and deploy corrective updates in early morning hours to reduce interruptions to your users.

 

Is the SaaS Trend a Lasting One?

 

The quality and reliability of SaaS solutions continues to improve month by month. A 2008 survey of 260 firms around the globe by Gartner states that close to 90% of the organizations polled said they expect to maintain or grow their relationships with SaaS providers. More than 33% indicated they plan to move on-premises hosting and applications to SaaS vendors.

In fact, in social media, the movement to SaaS solutions is accelerating, and the benefits above explain a few of the reasons why.

 

Please comment if you have a SaaS experience to share.

 

 

 

 

It’s true that Facebook is a fine gathering spot for meeting friends and finding new ones. The site itself is well-executed and innovative and provides flexible security options. Facebook also boasts a clean, uncluttered design which is easy to navigate.

That’s the first problem.

Facebook’s look says, Facebook. To try to organize and promote a community within Facebook would forever put you in direct competition with the “Facebook” brand. It’s literally a no-win situation. Instead, consider the significant advantages of a custom-tailored, totally integrated online destination wrapped seamlessly around your existing brand.

The first advantage of a custom community is that you have a unique url destination and full control over all of the community’s elements—how it looks, how it functions and how it reinforces your goals. In addition, a full-featured, branded online community lets you deploy a precise range of networking tools and gives you total control over membership permissions and activity. As your membership grows, a custom community will be scalable, allowing you to meet the challenges of growth and the evolution of your organization’s objectives.



Throughout its existence, a destination built on a Facebook page will severely limit the type and number of social media tools you can offer your followers. Then, if Facebok chooses to delete applications or activities that your fans really like, or adds features that don’t make sense, or imposes guidelines that curtail your community’s growth, well, there is simply nothing you can do.

What about ownership of your followers’ basic data, starting with their email addresses? With Facebook, you will have no automated or bulk access to critical email lists. This single issue is a major drawback when compared to a custom community with built-in administrative control over membership data.

Above all, if you decide it is easy and cost-effective to create a community on Facebook, your competition may be thinking the very same thing. So whatever ideas or initiatives you deploy on your Facebook page, your competitor can copy your innovations within hours or days. That tends to make the power of original content short-lived at best.
The obvious counter-strategy to the copy-cat problem is to launch your own proprietary community, one that is unique, creatively branded and resistant to simple mimicking.