Whether your IT department is large or small, social networking sites demand special skill sets and specific engineering expertise. Communicate these points to your IT resources and start an objective conversation before moving forward about the possibility of using a SaaS vendor.

 

 Know clearly what you want to accomplish

 

 For an implementation to succeed, you need to have a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish. Unless you do, a vendor will be the one to help you define your needs, and your platform will end up based on their ideas. Be certain your IT personnel know they will be involved in any dialogue with a potential vendor, start to finish.

 

 

 If your goal is rapid ROI, make sure IT knows this

 

Whether it’s common knowledge or stated formally, every department is aware of its limitations. Hosted solutions definitely lend themselves to a more rapid deployment which will translate into more rapid ROI. Compare the implementation projections submitted by potential providers to your IT department’s projections. Stick to your goals.

 

 Lay out the upfront costs to IT decision-makers

 

After consultations with prospective partners, the real-world numbers of your implementation should be clearly spelled out. After all, industry experts estimate a huge savings reward in outsourcing IT development. In fact, the reductions in capital outlay and operating costs will help drive the SaaS market to over $10 billion in revenue by 2011. A trend that powerful is difficult to argue with.

 

Start a dialogue about the breadth of your ITdepartment

 

 Smaller companies, especially, should be cautious about implementing a large in-house social media project. If your IT staff has an obvious bandwidth limit, they will understand the pitfalls of onsite development and engineering. Discuss with your IT director whether his or her staff is prepared to take charge of security, management and connectivity for the long haul. An agreeable consensus should come to light sooner rather than later. If your breadth of IT resources is limited, the services of a SaaS provider really begins to make sense.

 

Find a balance between aggressive and realistic objectives

 

 Ask for your IT leaders’ input on goal-setting. Empower them to do an independent analysis of a planned social media project’s demands on human resources and physical capacity, then together, compare the costs and scheduling estimates to the submissions of your top vendor prospect. Again, agreement over the comparisons should evolve.

 

Let your IT people know you trust them

 

Take a look at point number six in this article at TechRepublic.

If your IT manager(s) and staff know you have faith in their abilities, they won’t feel slighted when a large-scale implementation is outsourced for the right reasons. Communicate your belief that IT is who you rely on when problems need to be solved and deadlines have to be met. Convey the realization that their core competencies will continue to grow and contribute to your organization’s success—even without the crush of a major social media deployment.

Please comment if you have thoughts about your IT department’s involvement in

Perhaps you were too shy to ask or just didn’t give social media definitions much thought. Either way, the evolution of social media terminology is a fascinating subject. And new, (often bewildering) technical phrases are coming into the spotlight at a prodigious rate. I mean, just a few years ago, no one had ever heard social networking. Now, Social Networking rules the net.

Aggregator
In computing, a feed aggregator, also known as a feed reader, news reader or simply aggregator, is client software or a Web application which aggregates syndicated web content (RSS feeds) in the form of news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing.

API
Application Programming Interface is programming code exposed to the outside world to give other developers outside your application or organization the ability to more easily interact with your software. Language-independent APIs are written in a way that means they can be called from several programming languages. This is a desired feature for a service-style API which is not bound to a particular process or system and is available as a remote procedure call. For example, online social communities utilize APIs to support features such as Remote Commenting and Single Sign-On.

Dynamic Content
Dynamic Content is at the core of the social media experience on the web. Clickable, easily-accessible content modules give members many engaging ways to express an opinion, share information, connect with other members, create a community group. post an event, upload photos and videos and much more. OAuth

OAuth is an open protocol that allows secure API Authorization in a simple and standard method for desktop, mobile and web applications. For consumer developers, OAuth is a method to publish and interact with protected data. For service provider developers, OAuth gives users access to their data while protecting their account credentials. In other words, OAuth allows a user to grant access to their information on one site (the Service Provider), to another site (called Consumer), without sharing all of his or her identity.

Profiling
Members of online communities can create individual user profiles, including vanity pages and URLs, to establish their presence within the community. Members can also personalize, edit and manage their profiles. Profiles are the core element of the online community, setting the stage for interaction and friending.
In a Profile, members can share as much (or as little) information as they wish. Along with a brief biography, a member can reveal his or her birthday, marital status, education, occupation, geography, hobbies, preferences in music/film, plus a virtually unlimited list of additional topics.
Profiling links make it easy for people to discover, connect and engage with other members.

SaaS
Software as a Service (SaaS, typically pronounced 'sass') is a model of software deployment where an application is hosted as a service provided to customers across the Internet. By eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer's own servers, SaaS alleviates the customer's burden of software maintenance, ongoing operation, and support.
As a term, SaaS is generally associated with business software and is typically thought of as a low-cost way for businesses to obtain the same benefits of commercially licensed, internally operated software without the associated complexity and high initial cost.

Social Networking
Social Networking is the assembly, or coming together of individuals in specific groups or communities. Although social networking is possible in person, especially in schools or in the workplace, it is most popular online. This is because the Internet is filled with millions of individuals who are looking to meet other internet users to develop friendships and business relationships.
Depending on the website in question, many of these online community members share a common interest such as hobbies, religion, or politics.
So, members make like-minded friends, and easily share ideas, information and visual content.

SSO
Single Sign-On is a method of access control that enables a user to log in once and gain access to multiple Internet sites without being prompted to log in again. A community developer who offers SSO uses centralized authentication for authentication purposes, and combines this with techniques to ensure that users do not actively have to enter their credentials more than once.
SSO helps eliminate user “password fatigue,” saving visitors the time and bother of re-entering passwords for the same identity.

UGC
User Generated Content (UGC), refers to various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by end-users. In a community infused with social media tools, members have the opportunity to create a compelling profile, contribute to blogs, comment on a blog or article, upload photos and videos, establish a Group, post an Event, and more. These positive activities encourage collaboration, skill-building and discovery.
Often UGC is partially or totally monitored by website administrators to avoid offensive content or language, copyright infringement issues, or simply to determine if the content posted is relevant to the site's general theme.

We welcome your comments if you have thoughts about social media terminology or trends.

First and foremost, you can advertise all over the Internet. And that’s fine if you have a plump marketing budget on top of already-spent social networking software funds. But today, let’s discuss social media traffic-building strategies aside from advertising.

Active blogging within the community is vital. Seed your own community blogs with frequent entries from a reliable source. This may not require the services of a full-time writer, but perhaps a dedicated part-time voice. Consistent quality of the content is probably more important than inconsistent, lackluster posts in great frequency.

Encourage active community members to offer relevant opinions as often as possible. Give them incentives such as prize awards, or even better, a flexible rating system that raises a member’s status in the community as they participate. The rating system should award points and display the number prominently, next to an individual’s profile image, for example.

Outside of the community, assign an administrator the role of linking to popular social sites with high-volume traffic. Over time, seeding of multiple links will produce results on destinations such as StumbleUpon, Digg and LinkedIn. 

Keep the registration for your community as simple and fast as possible. At the same time, give new members optional profile questions to answer to help empower their identity in the site. Be creative and fun with the questions. If you do, your new registrants will have fun with them, too. Later, after the answers have generated profile tags, curious browsers will be able to browse and view another member’s profile info in a one-click step. This generates Friending activity.

Another rewarding strategy that will help draw visitors to a fledgling community is search engine optimization (SEO). Prior to deployment, community administrators (or managers) should be vigilant about optimizing keywords in all of the tabs, heads and subheads. Careful thought should help specify titles that search engines will respond to. 

After launch, after researching and identifying the best keywords for your brand’s SEO, frequent outreach on the web should leverage these same keywords. In other words, building traffic starts pre-launch with intelligent SEO decisions, and continues indefinitely with linking efforts based on extended keyword research.

For any community, especially one without an overwhelming brand identity, success comes down to smart management. Along with reaching out by linking to sites that will link back to yours, community managers need to connect online with every possible expert in your field or industry. Inspire these leaders to believe in your goals and to help promote your social community.

Administrators of your site can also host all types of traffic-building events regularly in the community. One distinct advantage is your ability to advertise these happenings in your own site for very little cost. Whatever the event is...contest, competition or prize-winning challenge...invite your most active members directly to participate. Promote the event with persistence and make sure the activities leading up to it are fun and persuasive.

Finally, focus on marketing your community online with podcasts and webinars. At the same time, every so often, move out of the virtual world and attend a real-world event. Make these an opportunity to collect content for use on the site, and to connect with potential members. However you approach your plans for sparking community growth, your efforts should be well-planned, energetic and uninterrupted.

We welcome your comments if you have thoughts about boosting traffic in a social media community.

You’re shopping for a company who creates, deploys and maintains online social media communities. What should you be looking for? Does it matter whether a provider is small or large? If you get a lower price and what appears to be a better proposal from a startup with a short track record, should you take it?

Weighing the Pros and Cons of Small Versus Large

Many young, small startups in the social media space create dazzling innovations that might give your community an edge. But does your prospective startup have the bandwidth to take care of your needs over the long term? You have to be certain that a firm with a limited number of employees has enough resources to cover issues that arise post-launch. A larger social media vendor will have separate, well-established departments dedicated to addressing the inevitable problems that are part of the process, before and after deployment.

Communicate, then Comprehend What Your Smaller Vendor Is All About

 If you believe a smaller, less costly provider is a good fit for you, the most important aspect of your relationship is clear communication. You need to understand a potential partner’s philosophy, then examine real-world examples of how the company’s leaders implement that philosophy. Before you take the leap, make sure your dialogue with a vendor has depth and meaning—don’t succumb to a combination of buzz words and sizzle. Ask for the steak.

Research Online, then Take Care in Preparing Your RFP

Details about any prospective vendor, even smaller firms, should be easy to access on the Internet. After all, if they are any good at social media, they should have a dynamic web presence, even if their quantity of projects is limited. Online information should give you a “homework head-start” before you initiate contact. When you prepare a request for proposal, take care to clearly outline your social media objectives. Also, get to know a future partner’s people intimately—especially if a company’s executive staff is smaller in scale.

How Dynamic and Complex Do You Want Your Online Community to Be?

Are you diving into the social networking space in a big way, or is your plan to start small and grow your social media footprint as you become more fluent with social networking? If you’re contemplating a more gradual approach, many smaller providers are excellent at creating individual tools which can be deployed at a lower cost and still have a significant impact. Some of these widgets may be integrated within your existing web sites without the expense of launching a white label community that boasts multi-layered solutions and tools.

Perhaps You Really Need All of the Services a Well-Established Vendor Can Provide

A larger social media solutions organization usually furnishes a greater degree of reliability and deployment experience. Also, if a company has been in business for many years (rather than a few), they will have cohesive departments that perform consistently. If a less seasoned prospect neglects account management, client services, product development, Q&A, or engineering refreshes, your social media venture could be compromised in a short interval. On the other hand, an experienced, recognized vendor can offer you the confident fulfillment only relationships with large, well-known organizations can forge over time.

Summing up the Risk and Reward of Choosing Small over Large

One benefit of going with a smaller provider is that you have a good chance of receiving more personalized service since you will be a big focus of their efforts. This probability has an appeal all its own and may be a good fit for your size and immediate intentions. You can always consider switching vendors and social media platforms if it doesn’t work out. But there are unavoidable challenges—and obvious costs—in switching providers, either early or late. Extracting data from an old platform, plugging it into a new one, then re-implementing integration...these are all expensive propositions. However, if a smaller prospect’s depth of personnel, breadth of services and financial strength aren’t paramount to you, the smaller pick could prove advantageous.

Hitting the Sweet Spot in Your Decision-Making

 In terms of a vendor’s head count, perhaps a moderate approach on your part might ultimately be the most successful. An organization with hundreds of employees could simply be too large for your corporate culture. But a youthful startup with two to 15 overworked individuals might be too small. In the final analysis, your search may advance more productively if you shoot for the middle and start by researching social media firms with growing ranks of 20 to 50 experienced professionals. An organization of this relative size might deliver the best of all worlds to your social media debut. All told, a mid-size company would be small enough to be fast and flexible, but still be well-versed in all of the processes that equate success.

Please express your opinions about the search for a perfect-size solutions provider in the social networking space.