Create a Social Networking Site and Monetize it

If you have an e-commerce website you know how tough competition is these days. Most of e-commerce websites are built in plattforms that allow customization of the look and feel but they have limited options on customazing how to present your products. As a results a lot of them looks like the one that your competitors have. Well it you are one of our customers these limitations are not part of the contract. You can really define how to present your gallery of products and how to make them more appelling to your customers. Related with this aspect of your social networking site or e-commerce site, websites like cuflinks.com and weber.com do a great job using Product Photogaphy and also videos.

As explained in a great article from smashing magazine. Product Photography could well be the single most important design aspect of any e-commerce website. Without the ability to touch, hold, smell, taste or otherwise handle the products they are interested in, potential customers have only images to interact with. Ultimately, the softer, tastier, flashier and more attractive your products look to shoppers, the more confident they’ll feel about purchasing from you and the better your conversion rate will be.

While any product can look great in a photo (sometimes deceptively so), keep in mind that your images should match your website’s overall aesthetic and your company’s image. This is key so if you are contracting a company to develop your e-commerce site be sure you can customize your product gallery as you really want and not as thousand as other medirocre e-commerce sites. If you need assistance with a new e-commerce site or to integrate e-commerce features in your regular or social networking site please do not hesitate to contact us. Rsitez is the leader on custom social networking sites and powerful e-commerce is one of our areas of expertise.

The examples that I mentioned have incorporated high-quality product photos onto their websites.

CuffLinks.com
CuffLinks.com clearly puts effort into photographing its vast selection of cufflinks. It offers customers a good view of its cufflinks from all angles. It also shows the packaging or box that the cufflinks will ship in, giving us a well-rounded impression. Fortunately for this company, the size and inflexibility of cuff links make them a relatively easy product to photograph. Take a look at their many other products and the different angles the shots have been taken from.

Weber
Moving out of the kitchen and into the backyard, Weber, a well-known maker of grilling and other cooking equipment, has a fine product photography area on its website. The website itself is pretty basic, as you might expect, without much in the way of attractive text or icons, but the sharp images and high-quality close-ups add a lot of visual appeal.

So, Product Photography can really enhance your e-commerce website and can make a huge difference on your customer experience.  If you liked this post, then read Smashing Magazine’s recent article in How to Use Photos to Sell More Online for another look at photography and e-commerce. Also consider this extensive practical guide to photographing various products.

Personally, I always find TED presentations very inspiring. The latest that I watched is from Seth Priebatsch, a 21 year-old that runs SCVNGR. Two things impressed me about Seth Priebatsch: One, his infectious, get-you-out-of-your-chair enthusiasm. Two, the inventory of entrepreneurial feats he’s managed to accumulate at a remarkably young age. He got his first startup at age 12, and by age 18, he’d founded another — PostcardTech, which makes interactive marketing tours for CD-ROM.

Now he’s working on SCVNGR, “a massive experiment in building a mobile game together.” Backed by Google Ventures, SCVNGR is part game, part game platform. Players play SCVNGR by going places, doing challenges and having fun — outside of the office, beyond the screen, in the real world.

I think he points different ways in who you can use what he calls “game layer” to engage your website´s members or users and also make money. In his video there are different examples of monetization and here in rsitez we already developed custom social networking sites that contained some of these elements. The results varied by site but overall I agree with Seth these tools are very powerful. Anyway, judge by yourself if his presentation inspire you. Enjoy!

Checking the 2010 Andy awards winners, I come across this new website www.booneoakley.com that has been built using Youtube technology, see the video below. The results are pretty amazing and it got amazing buzz. This is one more way to use social media technology. At rsitez we helped some customers to built their social networking sites around video concepts and maybe this is what is coming next…I like it! good job Boone Oakley! Check it out

According to the new Nielsen Co. report, the shift to social networks for communication is changing how internet users spend their time online. We already know it but this is one more confirmation in how social networking websites and software is affecting how people interact online. With Facebook leading the pack, social networks now account for 22.7 percent of the hours spent in front of a computer, a leap of 43 percent over last year’s figures.

The shift to social networks for communication caused a precipitous drop in email and instant messaging. Time spent emailing was down 28 percent and instant messaging dropped 15 percent.

Given a typical hour, Nielsen says the average user will spend 13 minutes on Facebook and other social networks, six minutes playing games, five minutes with email, 2 minutes each on browsing Internet portals like Yahoo, instant messaging, watching videos, conducting searches, and reading software information for a total of 36 minutes. The balance of the hour is spent on 77 additional categories measured by the firm, all of which take 2 minutes or less.

I can only see this trend continue to grow as more and more unique social networking sites and other kind of online communities are developed to cover more topics and users interests.

Maybe you have an idea to create a social networking website.  Not one like all the others that you have seen.  Many of them look the same and have exactly the same features.  You have an idea that will make your site … unique.  A vision that will make your social network stand out from the rest.  You have thought about how to grow and monetize the site.  You know what features you would like to have on the site.  You have a targeted niche audience and a clear value that you would like to provide. The problem now is to find someone to build the site exactly the way you like and to do it within your budget.  How do you go about this?

You can create a social network within a few minutes by simply going to rsitez.com.  However, rSite go beyond the 1-site fit all approach often used with social networks.

rSitez makes creating a custom social networking site easy by using the UDD methodology to develop a custom social networks.  These sites are based on your specific requirements.  This approach involves 3 steps in the process.

rSitez UDD Methodology

Understand (U) – A Project Manager from rSitez team will give you a call to discuss your vision for the project.  The technical responsibility of the project definition lies with the Project Manager, not you.  So you don’t need to understand the technology, code, technical jargon or fill out long forms in order to try to explain how the software should work. You will simply need to explain in your own words on the phone with a live person what you want the site to do.

The project manager will be able to ask follow up question to get a clear understanding of your project, the features you would like, and how to implement these features.  The focus will be on your vision for your social networking software.  Once we are clear about what you want from our discussions with you we are ready for the next phase of the UDD methodology.

Develop (D) – Our Development team is responsible to developing the application per your specific requirements.  They convert your vision for your social network to actual code for the application.  For example, instead of searching for members by city you may want to search on members within a certain radius (ex: within 100 mile of your location).  The development team will write the code to do this.  Or you may want to have integration with your corporate system where someone can click a link from your corporate application and automatically login to your social networking site without having to sign in again.  Our developers will write the code to do this or any other custom features you would like for your site.

Some examples of recent custom features our developers have created for clients include:

- Single signon where members from a corporate system can automatically login to their social network

- Facebook feeds with comments and friends

- Radius search to target geographical advertising

- Facebook integration where content and branding from the client site is posted direct to members facebook wall

- Full document library where any type of document can be uploaded and shared with other members

- Webcam and video sharing features

- Payment and monetization options and integration with different payment processors

- Different member types where specific features and access are given to members based on client specification

- Points and reward systems

- Management content reporting and downloads

and much more

Deploy (D) – Our development team will help you to deploy your application.  This includes providing full documentation for custom developed features, responding to any questions about the application, and providing technical support. The team continues to support the application indefinitely after the deployment based on our licensing agreement.  The team is also available to create additional features or meet new development requirements per request.

The end result is a custom social network with unique features that meet your specific requirements.  This will enable you to provide a targeted offering and let your social network stand out from other networking sites online.  This could help your site to grow faster and better than competing social networks. In the end your members will appreciate the specific details, value, and targeted approach provided by your network.

About the author

Rohan Hall is the Founder/CEO of rSitez, Inc. (www.rsitez.com), a technology firm that helps entrepreneurs create custom, revenue-based social networking sites.  He is the author of Stop Working, a book that teaches entrepreneurs how to use technology, globalization, and networks to build a global business.  He has developed technologies for a wide range of entrepreneurs and Fortune500 clients including HP, Corning, Oracle, Honda and various others.