You Ning-Nong!
So Ning is about to make users pay for their service. Bummer. Check out Sam’s post (link here) to see why this move is lame.
My personal gribe with this whole fiasco is that I was about to build an internal Ning network for a project I’m working on. Now I find myself asking “how can I convince people to pay for what they thought would be free?” Well the answer is I’m not even going to bother. I’ll find an alternative that doesn’t cost anything and use that instead.
There is over-riding perception social media is synomoous with free. New-comers especially will be instantly turned off by the prospect of paying for anything – “Oh you’re trying sell me something? Yuk, See ya!” Established users may be able to see the benefit from the premium services on offer, but forget about attracting skeptical new-users.
So I’m playing round with Grou.ps, SocialGo and Spruz to see which of these I should recommend to users with differing degrees of social media acceptance. Mashable has a good post on these and other Ning Alternatives.
I’ll watch Ning thing closely but for now I’m going to avoid looking like a Ning-nong by promoting new CEO, Jason Rosenthal’s freepheobic business model.
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This post was written by Andy Moore (aka @MooreOfAndy). You can connect with him on both Twitter and Linkedin. |