The fact that Ning has just announced that it is withdrawing it’s free (‘ad-supported’) social network platform will come as a shock to many people who accepted Ning’s invitation and invested time and energy into building their own social network based on the Ning format.  Existing members will be offered the opportunity to pay or leave.

Clearly the ‘ad-supported’ model isn’t bringing Ning the return it expected or needs.  I’m not surprised. I almost never click on Google Ads and nor does anyone else I know.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this can’t bring the kind of returns on investment that people are looking for.  So out goes the ad-supported model and in comes the ‘pay for service’ model – and that can’t be good news for the Google Ad model.

If Ning made a mistake with its business model, maybe it made an even bigger one in its underlying assumption that people want to create, populate and control a social networking environment when in fact, all they want to do is participate in the ones that are already out there, fully populated, like Facebook and Twitter.

Ok, so after about day 6 of trying last summer I just forgot about it and got on with my life.  Until someone sent me a link to Paul Walsh’s blog where he provides a link straight through to a ‘delete your account’ page.  This page is pretty much invisible if you’re trying to find it from inside Ecademy.  At least it was to me.

Not having used Ecademy for over 6 months, I followed the link and deleted my account.

On the one hand, you can’t blame them for hiding the ‘get me the hell out of here’ link.  Networking sites like Ecademy are all about ‘claimed numbers of members’ (however loose the definition of ‘member’ might be).  Sadly, it’s all about keeping those numbers up to convince advertisers and partners to part with money.

In reality, Ecademy’s ‘membership’ number was always hotly disputed by increasingly pesky self-styled sleuths whose investigations started to show how shockingly small a percentage of Ecademy’s claimed active members were actually that.  It became clear to anyone with a brain in the last couple of years that a large number (some even suggested a majority) of Ecademy’s members were completely inactive and had been since their addition to the system.

I’m not going to get into a discussion of why I didn’t find Ecademy useful or its increasingly spammy approach – there’s plenty of discussion online in other places if you’re interested.

So, around about day 180ish and I deleted my account.  Or did I?  Some say that if I were to go to Ecademy and try to sign in, I’d be through to my old account again Facebook-stylee.  I’ll let you know.

Twitter is a way to publish / broadcast little chunks of information (140 characters).  That can be text, links to interesting things or repeating things other people have said.  This takes place within a global network.  You build up your network by following other people or being followed.  Often people follow the people who follow them.  Sometimes they don’t.

Everyone you follow or who follows you is part of your network and each person in your network has their own network.  You can explore all the people in the network of someone who is in your network.  Wherever you find interesting people you can view them and their tweets (their ‘feed’).  If you want, you can follow them.

When you follow someone, their tweets appear (along with those of everyone else you follow) in an overall ‘feed’ of tweets from everyone in your network.  When you’re following 20 people, that’s quite a few tweets a day.  When you’re following 10,000 people that’s a hell of a lot of tweets a day.

What’s the point?  Well, you can follow people who are particularly interesting in terms of your speciality of niche, for example.  How do you find them?  Maybe you already know them – in which case, you find out their Twitter name and follow them.  Maybe you find them because someone you’re already connected to in Twitter has them in their network.  Or, maybe you find them by searching all Twitter’s tweets for certain keywords.   If you search for ‘nasa’ you’ll get back a list of tweets mentioning ‘nasa’.  You can skim through all the people tweeting to decide who you think has something useful to offer you and follow accordingly.

Twitter makes it just as easy to find every time you’ve been mentioned (offering lots of potential for measuring the success of online marketing efforts).  It allows you to send private, direct messages to people that you follow and who are following you.

Once you’ve created a Twitter account, there are many ‘Twitter clients’ you can use to manage your Twitter communications whether via a browser, your iPhone, a blackberry or your laptop.

The beauty of Twitter is that it’s brief, almost instantaneous and global.  It is faster than the news networks meaning – increasingly – that it’s the place for breaking news.  And it’s currently free.

On the plus side, Twitter is the fastest global communication tool currently out there with all the power and searchability of the internet built in.  It’s what social media is really all about.  It’s so good that it will kill Facebook off within a couple of years.  Use it to offer people valuable information and links and you’ll go far.  Use it to feed your overblown ego, on the other hand, and you’ll find yourself on a fast-track to damaging your reputation in no time.

Do’s:

• Do give away useful information (via links or by ‘re-tweeting’ things other people have given away)
• Do ‘big up’ other people in your network and get introductions going
• Do be a real person (not a cool nickname and avatar)
• Search for people talking about the things you care about and follow them

Don’ts:

• Don’t follow people just to build up your numbers
• Don’t try to use Twitter to get rich quick
• Don’t be indiscreet (personally or professionally)
• Don’t post 100 tweets a day, it’s really boring

I popped into Ecademy this afternoon briefly and took a quick scan of the blogs.

Interestingly, most had 20, 30 or 40 views.  All except the one titled ‘Bad Feelings At Ecademy‘ which had 657 views.  Naturally, I dived in to see what the fuss was all about.

The fuss (as usual) was all about an Ecademist falling out with the management and getting booted off.  “Fight! Fight! Fight!” I can almost hear ringing in my ears.

Sadly, nothing seems to attract us more than conflict – and I’m as programmed as anyone to being drawn towards the dark side. Is it because we love suffering?  Is it because in argument there’s something more honest than the superficiality we normally cloak ourselves in?

There’s no doubt though.  Nastiness gets traffic.  Blood, guts, misery, depravation, disaster and sleaze is what people want.  In a low-key but inarguable way, those figures on Ecademy prove it.  Again and again.

The 4Networking ’4Community’ magazine is a rare beast – a successful blend of good design, good copy and effective online reading technology.

Worth having a read – and worth checking out 4Networking both on and offline. If you’re new to networking and you want a more relaxed, fun approach to B2B networking, then 4Networking breakfast meetings are a great way to start.

What happens if you switch on too many cutesy applications in Facebook?

YAAAAGHHH! You repeatedly crash my browser, that’s what!

The famous pink shirt should make this person instantly recognisable to the business networking community.

Has anyone else made themselves practically unavailable as a result of using Facebook to it’s fullest?

We’d love to hear from you

I’ve always been interested in what makes a forum work – or not work. Recently, I’ve been jumping between Sales and Marketing Forum UK – or SAMFUK as I like to call it – and A1. Although SAMFUK’s gone through a considerable makeover recently it still hasn’t achieved the easy readability of A1. The simple result is that I’ve spent far more time recently on A1.

Moving from SAMFUK to A1 is like putting on your reading glasses mid way through trying to text someone. Its only when you’ve done it, you realise how much you were struggling before.

If I’m really, really honest, a lot of the time I’m probably doing it because I suffer from a need to be right. Right?

Typically in our house it goes like this:

“Are you coming to bed?”

“I can’t. This is important!”

“What?”

“I’ve got to finish this post.. it’s…er.. very….”

Clare goes to bed. 60 minutes of furious writing / editing later:

“Why the hell am I doing this?!” [Quits without posting]

What bothers me more is the internet’s underlying ‘pornography’ – its capacity to supply endless, necessarily shallow, amoral, 2-dimensional chunks of increasingly visual material for the pleasurable consumption of everyone from pre-school upwards.

It astonishes me that we’re outraged that Google serves up a jpg of genitalia to our kids but we’re completely comfortable with them spending their lives constructing their self-esteem around how many Bebo friends they have acquired – or them spending hours ‘consuming’ 2-dimensional people on ‘Hot or Not’.

You might think I’m being over the top but if – for a moment – you could stop identifying porn with a ‘thing’ (the picture, the stage show, the DVD, the private shop)- then you could only describe it in terms of what it does to / for people and how we relate to it.

What is porn, then, if we can’t name the ‘thing’ we usually label it as? Its a way of looking; a way of using ‘things’ to feel something; a way of relating to the world. Its a way of representing people and things. How does porn treat people? The portrayed? The consumer? Aha. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Difficult? Deep? Heavy? Yes. The girl on the front page of Hot or Not when I clicked through is there for what reason? To know how hundreds of anonymous viewers will judge her. Her what? Why is she there? To try to build her self-esteem based on how many men find her attractive. How is that different from what we call pornography?

“We sometimes talk about vulnerability like its some kind of conscious style decision. ‘Shall I do vulnerable in this or that situation..?’

I prefer to see vulnerability not as a choice but as a consequence of a choice to be open; to be who I am rather than what my ego would prefer others to think I am; to risk being seen; to risk lowering my defenses; to communicate rather than react and create conflict.

To affect ‘vulnerability’ is about as manipulative a strategy as is the deliberate mirroring of body language in order to force ‘rapport’ and influence decisions.

For most people, being invulnerable means hiding behind heavier and heavier armour and striking out before anything or anyone can hurt them. Or hiding from the world in a cocoon of alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, work, anger, relationships… the list goes on.

On that basis, being vulnerable is good for me.”