Social Media Strategies

To ning or not to ning; seems to be the question buzzing around the Blogosphere recently. There have been a lot of valid arguments about it being too restricting and hence less useful. I agree that you can’t simply expect it to work for everyone. The good news, however, is that Ning can definitely work well for event marketers, if used properly. Here are ten reasons why event marketers shouldn’t just walk away from Ning.

1- Super simple and quick to setup: Unlike other event pages, Ning can take as little as 10 minutes to setup the entire page. You can customize the look and feel however you want it to be. It’s as simple as picking and choosing themes, colors and fonts that you think will work best for the site.

2- Easy to add multiple events: Once your site is setup, adding events against calendar dates is a simple one step process. The members and visitors to the site will be able to look at the upcoming events and can refer to the inbuilt calendar for the activities taking place.

3- Single platform for all community members: While a lot of people argue that you should disperse your communication across multiple mediums, it’s actually sometimes useful to have a single platform for a specific audience set. For example, if you build a Ning page for your existing community, customers and past clients then it’s good to have a single place to get them all together. My customers or prospects on email can’t get to know those on Facebook or Twitter and vice versa. Often, the first time that they meet is at actual events that I organize. Ning can allow all the community members to network on the same platform without getting bogged down by restrictions and memberships.

4- Reduces time to update members: Whenever I have a quick and important update to make, related to an event status, I just have to add it to Ning and can rest assured that the community members will see it. I won’t necessarily have to go to each of the different social media sites individually to notify the different sub groups of community members that I have. Event managers and marketers are mostly in a hurry, and this is a sure shot way to save time.

5- Easy integration with other mediums: Ning offers the ability to add videos from Youtube, photos from Flickr, Posts from your Blogs, and content from other mediums such as Facebook Pages. This cross integration helps to build a single platform for content coming in from multiple channels. So if you already have photos of your events or blog posts etc, you can share them on Ning with the entire community easily.

6- Rich content: The ability to add multimedia content like videos, sound files and pictures makes the page incredibly rich and interesting. If you’ve just had an event, you can upload its video footage along with sound files of the presenters and pictures of the audience. People who were at the event will find it thrilling to go over the content, and those who couldn’t make it will see just how much they missed out on.

7- Easy demonstration of credibility and proof: As event marketers, we often have to demonstrate credibility by displaying past experiences or case-studies. Nothing speaks better than pictures of successful events and post-event excitement straight from the audiences. Ning can capture all of that information for interested prospects to see and evaluate.

8- Newbie friendly: Some event marketers find it daunting to get their crowds to network online. While most people are great at events, they are less interested in using social media networks for collaborating with other people. Mostly, it’s because of the learning curves or behavioral adjustments (or restrictions) of certain apps like twitter etc. The good thing about Ning is that it is very easy to understand and get into even for non-techies.

9- Single-stop source for all events: For people interesting in finding out the status or schedule of your events, they can simply check out the Ning page to see the latest activities. Prospects are more likely to catch on to the vibes when they see a lot of things going on concurrently on the site.

10- Multiple conversations: You can use the inbuilt forums to run multiple conversation threads with different sub-groups of your community (e.g. a sub-group of events targeting a reunion). This allows other people to know what kind of activities are taking place, without interfering with the discussions in the individual threads. This is a great place for getting feedbacks, having competitions, brainstorming on event ideas, sharing stories from previous events, filling out surveys, etc.

All in all, I’d say, do check it out yourself to see how you can use it as a community space. Don’t restrict it to a single event’s page, but make it into a place where you can share all of your events with your community.

Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)

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