Sarah Worsham

Pluck SiteLife is a hosted social networking application which resides entirely within your website via javascript or API calls. This interesting combination keeps social network members on your website (for brand and traffic) and integrates seemlessly with the rest of your content, allowing use of your own ad servers and analytics programs.

Architectural Record (from McGraw-Hill) is an excellent example of how invisible the lines can be between your website content and the social network – sometimes even overlapping. The out-of-the-box javascript implementation has the downside of the social network content being invisible to search engines for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. Most content in a social network may not be important for SEO but it is something to keep in mind depending on your industry and audience. Important content can be implemented using their APIs to display the content in your site’s HTML, which will be visible to search engines.

SiteLife’s customers include McGraw-Hill, News Corp., Reuters Media, Circuit City, and the Washington Post (customer list). SiteLife Platform is the basic package with functionality added through Reactions, Videos, Photos, Blogs, Forums and Personas (visit links for examples of implementation):

• Platform: Community management, reporting, abuse management, branded experience, single sign-on, shared services, hosting and management.
• Reactions: Comments, recommendations, reviews, ratings, and article submissions.
• Videos: Flash video with conversion, sharing, public video galleries, ratings, recommendations, comments, email this video, integrated discovery tools, moderation, brand control, and integration with advertising programs.
• Photos: Galleries for general or specific topics, managed photo queue, upload options, mobile posting, tagging, titles, descriptions, automatic scanning and resizing, recommendations, ratings, comments, and email to a friend.
• Blogs: Rapid startup, moderation, author tools, integrated photos, content control, and multi-author blogging.
• Forums: Author tools, moderation, search, discovery, migration from other forums, groups, and user signatures.
• Personas: Personal landing page, user profile, friends, messages and custom templates.

Pricing includes an initial setup fee and then a monthly service fee which depends on how many page views and modules you have. The average setup fee for large websites (like Washington Post) is $50k-$100k and then a monthly service fee in the low thousands.

Technorati Tags: social networks, B2B social networks, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

Small World Labs offers a PHP hosted social network application with custom look & feel and full control over the functionality. Clients include Oracle, American Cancer Society, CMP, Save the Children, Special Olympics (client list). There are three different price points with different functionality and options. Available functions include: profiles, audio, video, polling, tagging, forum, jobs, classifieds, wikis, surveys, audio/video broadcast, podcasts, ratings, reviews and more (full feature list).

This is true social networking software, not just community features with social network built in, where your profile is tied to all the content you view, rate, comment on and share. There is an in depth member search function to allow members to connect with others with similar interests. Content within the social network can be displayed on your website or you can take content from your website and display it within the network. The network can integrate with external ad servers – different levels of the software allow different amount of advertising placements and you can target ads to particular groups, features, etc. Small Labs uses Google Analytics for statistics but can also integrate with any tag-based analytics program.

Features of interest:

• Email is sent internally within the community so visitors do not need to reveal their contact information unless they want to.
• Events can be created for online or offline events with both public and personal calendars.
• Groups also have their own calendar and can be public, open, closed or hidden. These are communities within a community and allow smaller niches to form within your network. Groups can have their own main page, photos, blogs, forum, members, files, etc.
• Security options can be set throughout the community. There is automatic and customizable filtering for profanity and social network members can report objectionable materials. To help with moderation, members can be appointed to police certain portions of the network with customizable amount of control.
• Photos, Audio and Video can be uploaded which can be rated and commented upon by members. This content can be displayed throughout the community or your website as Most Recent, Most Rated, Most Viewed, Top Rated, Most Commented to drive more traffic to this portion of the network. Any video that is uploaded is transcoded and turned into flash when it is uploaded to decrease the amount of bandwidth used.

Pricing depends for annual fees include license, hosting and development: Platform starts at $20k, Professional at $40k, and Enterprise at $60k with included monthly bandwidth levels of 1 million, 2 million and 3 million page views respectively. The networks can have as many members you want and platforms and modules can be switched at any time. To pay for all this, any ad, ecommerce, access revenue is completely yours.

Technorati Tags: social networks, B2B social networks, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

Yesterday I took a look at Prospero, which is really more of a community vendor with social networking thrown in as an add-on. They run the community engines for some fairly large sites: Marthastewart.com, Business Week, iVillage, Monster (full client list). They have been in the business on the Internet since 1992, first as an ISP, then moving to developing interactive applications, which is where communities fit in.

Prospero is excellent at seamless integration, allowing community and website content to intermingle on any website. They focus mostly on community with boards, chats, reviews, article comments, and polls. Social networking is an add-on, which allows “advanced profiles”, but does not provide a true tool for finding and connecting with peers. If you want a hands-off approach, Prospero will build and integrate whatever components you want with even seeding and moderation services available.

Their pricing is based on the modules you use with additional monthly charges for operations and usage. For the basic engine, messaging and social networking, I was given list price ballparks of $9k/month for licensing, $2k/month for operations, and $500/month for approximately 500,000 monthly page requests for a grand total of $11,500/month. With volume discounts, the price would probably be closer to $7800/month. There is also an initial cost for professional services to design, build and integrate your community (they said these costs are almost always lower than $30k and often closer to $10k) with a 4-8 week startup time.

These costs clearly put Prospero out of the range of small and medium B2B businesses and just about anyone else who does not have a clear understanding of the ROI and revenue streams. They also use ASP and .NET coding on their side, which just rubs me the wrong way (I have seen very few web applications done well in these “languages”).

Technorati Tags: social networks, B2B social networks, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting